[TriLUG] Looking for a good laptop for development

[John Franklin via TriLUG]

I agree with Wes.  1024 x 768 was the de facto standard circa 1992, when monitors were 4:3 and XGA ruled, though it was commonly called SVGA.  Nowadays, 16:9 widens that old resolution to 1366.  Systems in the era of 4K TV shouldn’t be any smaller than 1080p, IMHO.

<rant>
What I find maddening is how we can’t arbitrarily scale the displays, or even better, displays can’t auto-scale so 72 point text is 1 inch tall.  The graphics engine -- XOrg or Wayland -- can tell how big the monitor is physically (it’s usually in the EDID), knows the resolution of the display, and can do the math.  XOrg/Wayland is sitting on top of a GPU, a floating point engine that is purpose-built for transforming graphics, the most boring transformation being scaling.  And yet, Gnome in Fedora 29 *still* only supports 100% and 200% scaling, as if floating point math hasn’t been invented yet.

Resolution should make graphics and text sharper, physical screen size should be the real estate.
</rant>

jf

> On Nov 17, 2018, at 5:18 PM, Wes Garrison via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 
> I'd say the 1600x900 is a good compromise then.
> 
> To each his own, but I find 768 vertical pixels too small to be useful even
> for the modern web, much less programming.
> _________________________________
> Wesley S. Garrison
> Network Engineer
> Xitech Communications, Inc.
> phone:  (919) 260-0803
> fax:       (919) 932-5051
> __________________________________
> "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from email."
> 
> 
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 4:27 PM Jimmy Dorff via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 2018-11-16 at 17:00 -0500, Wes Garrison via TriLUG wrote:
>>> Thinkpad Caveat:
>>> Don't get one with a 1366x768 res screen!  You really need at least
>>> 1600x900 and 1920x1080 is best.  It's absolutely worth the extra
>>> money.
>> 
>> The 1366x768 TN screen isn't very good. I'm actually selecting the
>> 1366x768 IPS screen on purpose. I find the 1080p screen too small, so I
>> scale the font size 1.5x. However I mostly work with a large external
>> monitor and the font scaling is too big on that.. and changing the
>> setting all the time is inconvenient.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
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> --
> This message was sent to: franklin at elfie.org <franklin at elfie.org>
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--
John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org

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