You can see a nice graph showing (Firefox) users steadily upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 from Mozilla's Firefox telemetry:
https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...
https://hardware.metrics.mozilla.com/#goto-os-and-architectu...
* In 2018, the most popular resolution for users of Firefox is still 1366x768. And only 1920x1080 is making any headway against the dominance of 1366x768. As much as I am surrounded by the culture of multiple 4K+ displays, apparently this is not at all commonplace. 4K doesn't even get listed, presumably lumped into the "Other" category.
* In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now.
* A surprising number of people still have Flash installed.
I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk?
To me, the hardware report shows technology is quite stagnant on display resolution and memory. 1366x768 is a resolution from 2002 or thereabouts. 4GB was common in desktop computers in 2005. ~15 years have passed and consumers in the $750 price range are still hamstrung with 1366x768 and 4GB of memory? I would expect better from a $750 phone, let alone a computer.
I think we're actually talking about computers that are very old and have never been upgraded or new computers in the $200 to $400 range.
So yes, the innards of your 2017 MBA are very old. It has Broadwell generation (circa 2014) CPU/GPU, and one optimized for power draw at that (i.e. a slower one).
In 2002, the most common resolutions were 4:3, not 16:9, not only because notebooks were not mainstream yet.
> 4GB [RAM] was common in desktop computers in 2005.
That's the time when notebooks became mainstream iirc. I purchased a gaming notebook in 2006, it had 1 GB RAM. I also bought a midrange notebook in 2009 which also came with 1 GB. (I later upgraded to 2 GB aftermarket.)
Sure. I didn't really intend to get into fine-grained technical details, but yes, back then 4:3 was the predominant aspect ratio. In fact, some of the 17" LCD displays from the time were that awkward 5:4 resolution of 1280x1024.
But putting specifics aside, the broader point is that computing technology—at least with respect to the most popular display resolution and amount of memory—is stagnant. In this thread there are people arguing for technology asceticism and making the point that 4GB and 1366x768 are good enough. And maybe they are for some people. I am surprised there are so many who are satisfied with this particular flavor of "good enough." (Though I would like to see how well that correlates with mobile device technology asceticism.)
I want the hardware industry to do better, and I thought things had started improving a few years ago when 4K displays emerged and the shackles of "High Definition" (1920x1080) were cast aside. But this data shows adoption of 4K displays for computing is so low it's not even measured as such. That disappointed me, but it's unsurprising. What surprised me was realizing 1920x1080 isn't the top dog I thought it was—in fact, the situation is worse than I thought.
And to my mind, all of this feeds into the subject at hand: an operating system vendor getting stuck. The embrace of "good enough" is suffocating.
I think there's a huge disconnect between what's you think is "common" and what people actually have. Steam hardware survey from 2009[1] says only 10% of steam (gaming) users have ram greater or equal to 4GB. I'm going to estimate that in 2005, that figure is less than 5%. Saying 4GB is common in 2005 would be like saying 64GB today is "common".
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20090415225520/http://store.stea...
There's quite a lot of these, e.g. HP Stream; the Windows license is much cheaper for these systems because they have such low specs.
If anything it's worse now because the RAM is soldered in and they're using BGA ICs which makes it impossible for most people to upgrade.
That being said, my parents are perfectly happy using Google chrome on 2gb ram with a core 2 duo. And that's not with only a few tabs.
It may come as a shock to you but there exists a world outside of California/London/random-tech-hub
£670 is much more than people I know want to spend on a new machine. None of them have ever mentioned screen resolution when i've asked what they want in a laptop.
It seems that most people who make websites nowadays think similarly. I don't get why they are making websites for themselves, rather than for their users.
Because most people making websites don't care about basic usability, even though they have stats that shows their users use small laptops they'll still stick a fixed header that takes 1/5 of screen real estate because it's the latest "bootstrap/material design fad". Google does this a lot, which is ironic with them pushing "AMP" on mobile, they can't even give regular people a good on experience on their laptop.
Websites become a problem on slow internet, which is surprisingly common in companies. This is because they are often located in cheap rent areas with little infrastructure.
I don't remember anyone having any problems running the latest chrome or Firefox. I think people even managed to run things like SolidWorks or Matlab perfectly fine on those machines.
It's been about 8 years since I last had a laptop without at least 1080p I think.
Because the latter is what most people buy for, as far as I can tell.
That said, I suspect most people over the age of 35 or so can't read text at "normal" size on a 1080p 12inch screen, so if they want a 12 inch screen they have to either scale up their text or drop the resolution. And I believe the reported resolution in the Firefox telemetry is the one the OS thinks it's using, not the one the hardware has.
In 2018, my computer only has 2GB RAM and runs more than fast enough for what I need on a 32-bit processor. I don't understand why some people always want bigger hardware numbers, rather than better software.
> * A surprising number of people still have Flash installed. I do too, I don't see how it's abnormal.
> I can barely conceive of the poor experience of running a modern web browser on 4 GB of memory at 1366x768. Can you imagine the user experience of today's modern over-JavaScripted web pages on such underpowered hardware: not simply slow because of their grotesquely large transmission payload but also because they caused your computer to start swapping memory pages to disk?
I can barely conceive of how narrow-minded and myopic your technological experience must be that you feel only the latest and "greatest" is viable. As someone who browses the Web regularly, I spend a lot of time on places like HN, YouTube, etc. My screen resolution is 1440x900 - one step above the 1366x768. As I said, 2GB RAM, etc. This is why I've argued, constantly, against the nonsense of Chrome and "modern" Firefox. That's why users of old computers are going to Pale Moon if they know about it, or back to Internet Explorer, or just not upgrading to the newest Firefox.
Your technological experience is very much a high-class experience, but you have to understand that there are users all over the world and in all economic positions. All this push toward expecting the best and most modern only works to force out the common person - in America it's the poor person in the ghetto who still is well above the position of people in other, even less prosperous nations. Most people, if they are lucky, have a used <$200 laptop which is often a decade or so old. Library computers are often almost as old - I know two libraries which are still running their .5GB 32-bit Windows NT2000 computers as patron-access machines because they are in poor areas and simply cannot afford to upgrade.
People who have the view that everyone should have base access to the latest, greatest, and most wonderful hardware upset me greatly. I have one comment about it that seems constructive. If you think it's so important that they should have this, you should provide it. If you can't give every person who has an old reliable computer (that they can repair) the newest bleeding-edge tech (and give them service when it inevitably breaks), then you need to understand that they have valid concerns too - and help provide better software and help others like you to understand what reality looks like for most of the world.
Malware authors rub their hands gleefully when they see sentiments like this being spread online by people like you.
Don't do any of those suggestions. Disable multiprocess mode in the Firefox config if you find it eats too much memory, stick with the ESR if you're scared of upgrading and use Edge over IE.
In any case you must be at least airgapping it (right?), so I guess it's academic.
Edit: you might be onto something here. Running an old, outdated browser on an old, unpatched 32 bit windows xp box might trigger some anti analysis defenses on whatever malware is sure to come your way. Security through being too obviously insecure!
But I know three families in low-income situations for whom that sort of PC is the only one they have, because they got it from either an office or a school when the place was discarding computers. So no, it's not being air gapped. It's the computer the kids look up homework info on, it's the one the parents use to search for jobs, and more. They can't afford to upgrade, and they're afraid that even upgrading the software would make the whole thing come apart at the seams.
I develop for an organization that serves people of mid-to-lower economic strata. 10% of our users are still on Windows XP.
We get caught up in the tech sector echo chamber and don't realize that upgrade cycles for millions of people is a lot slower than we are used to.
I think that it's not surprising to see what Firefox is reporting. A lot of people go to Firefox seeking something that runs faster or better than what came with their Windows box years ago. Most of the people we serve on low-end computers are Chrome, not IE/Edge.
Most of the tasks in the real world doesn't need multiple 4K displays, including low level and systems development. Most people read stuff, and as a developer and system administrator, when the text is looking good, this means the resolution is enough.
> In 2018, the most popular memory amount for users of Firefox is still 4GB, trailed by the also disappointingly small 8GB. In my world, I consider 16GB a bare minimum, but at least with memory I haven't been deluding myself—I know many people economize on memory. Still, I would have thought 8GB was the most common memory size by now.
8 GB is more than enough for most people. My family's Win10 desktop is happy with 4GB, my office desktop is cozy with 8GB. My own desktop has 16GB of RAM, but it runs many, albeit small, virtual machines. "The hardware is cheap, let's waste it" mentality doesn't help anyone and it's wrong. I've written some state of the art algorithms which use 1.5MB of RAM and make the CPU scream for cooling (I develop high performance computing software as a side-academic gig), so like every resource, RAM should be used sparingly.
Edit: I've no comment for flash. I think it's a forgotten remnant of old systems.
Personally, I've just upgraded from 1680x1050 to 1920x1080. My old monitor was 10 years old, and was performing relatively well. I bought a new one, because it started to show its age (mostly backlight age).
The other footnote should be that display prices have been crashing recently. You can get an IPS 24" FHD monitor for like $90, and a QHD version at 27" for about $150. Those would have been twice as expensive a few years ago.
That being said, all those 768p screens are crappy plastic laptops with really slow hard drives. That I guess is what we end up with the Intel took what should have just been the natural evolution of notebooks - small SoCs running a high PPI display in a metal frame - and made them into some premium brand name product with a huge margin on the prices of chips that cost peanuts to manufacture because they didn't have any real competition in the space for a very long time (and even then, their monopolistic behavior lets them keep AMD out of all the major brands premium notebooks anyway).
You're right, however not everyone has the same desktop space to accomodate a 27" panel. I can barely fit a 24" on my desk. 1440p monitors start at 25".
> The other footnote should be that display prices have been crashing recently.
When I was in the US at the end of 2014, one of my friends said the same thing about flash drives when I pointed out a $44 PNY 128GB flash drive. Unfortunately, other parts of the world doesn't work same way. Because EUR or other currencies are not fixed against US$, and prices fluctuate at most parts of the world if not increase. So, no, technology doesn't become cheaper as it matures at some parts of the world unfortunately.
Addendum: BTW, you are right about the 768p screens are generally found in entry level laptops or netbooks. These devices are most feasible ones when they first came out. Now they are bottom end cash cows which are virtually free to build.
You can get 24" 4k (2160p) 180ppi 60Hz for $300 e.g. LG 24UD58.
Anything higher resolution-wise requires a much larger display to be readable at 100% scaling. I'm adamantly against using scaling.
Why?
Perhaps my experience would have been better on a desktop, but this was for my work where I have a Surface Pro which when going from a docked to undocked state (or vice versa) with monitors that didn't match the same scaling as the surface resulted in graphical issues that can only be resolved by logging out then in again.
Also still come across apps that don't know how to scale so that can be really frustrating.
I have to say you have it exactly backwards!
Gaming on 4K is extremely expensive and still basically impossible at refresh rates higher than 60 Hz. In fact, you’ll be lucky to get even that much. 1440p/144Hz is a much better and more realistic target for even the most enthusiastic gamers.
Also a most welcome recent trend has been to ship with novel temporal antialiasing techniques, completely redefining how games can look at lower resolutions.
Temporal artifacts have always been the bane of 1080p, forcing higher resolutions either directly, or indirectly as subsampling. Once you take that out of equation, the benefit of native 4K is much more modest.
4K movies are nice, but as with games, it’s more of a linear progression. I doubt most people could even tell the difference in a blind test.
Full-range HDR is, in my opinion, a much better investment if you want to improve your TV viewing experience (and lately gaming as well) in a noticeable way.
I don’t know much about graphic design, but I doubt 4K is all that essential. Everyone has been using 96 dpi displays to create content for very high density mediums for a long time. Even the most craptastic ink printer is 300 dpi+. All you need is a zoom function. Color reproduction is, I think, much more important than resolution.
Where HiDPI displays really shine is actually in the most mundane: font rendering.
For anyone that works in the medium of text, programmers, writers, publishers, etc., a 4K display will be a considerable and noticeable quality-of-life improvement.
Even the most Unix-neckbeardy terminal dwellers will appreciate the simply amazing improvement in visual fidelity and clarity of text on screen[1].
> I tested out a 4k 28" and unless I had it at 200% scaling couldn't use it for longer periods of time.
That’s what you are supposed to do! :)
It’s only HiDPI at 200% scaling. Otherwise it’s just 2160p, or whatever the implicit resolution is for some partial scaling value.
For 4K at 100% scaling you’d need something like 45" screen at minimum, but that’s not actually practical once you consider the optimal viewing distance for such a screen, especially with a 16:9 ratio.
> I get more screen estate and still readable text with the 25" 1440p.
A 4K display should only provide extra space indirectly. With text on the screen looking so much sharper and more readable, it might be possible to comfortably read smaller font sizes, compared to equivalent 96 dpi display.
If you also need extra space as well, then that’s what 5K is for.
Though for things like technical drawings or detailed maps you can actually use all the extra 6 million pixels to show more information on the screen.
A single-pixel–width hairline is still thick enough to be clearly visible on a HiDPI display[2].
> but now you have to render 2.4x (Vs a 2560x1440 monitor) the amount of information for what I think is fairly little gain.
Yes, that’s an issue with things like games. However you can still display 1080p content on a 4K screen, and it looks just as good[3], and often even better[4].
Most graphics software will also work with 1080p bitmaps just fine. Vector graphics necessitates doing a little bit extra work, but for a very good payoff.
Overall though, for things like programming or web browsing, it shouldn’t matter. I have a netbook with a cheap Atom SoC (Apollo Lake) and it can handle 3K without breaking a sweat. That much more capable[5] GPU on your Surface Pro should easily handle even multiple 4K displays.
Pushing some extra pixels is not a big deal, if all you’re doing is running a desktop compositor with simple effects.
> going from a docked to undocked state (or vice versa) with monitors that didn't match the same scaling as the surface resulted in graphical issues that can only be resolved by logging out then in again.
Yeah that must suck. Still, it’s only a software bug, and you mustn’t let it keep you from evaluating HiDPI on its merits.
> Also still come across apps that don't know how to scale so that can be really frustrating.
That’s life on bleeding edge ;)
Sure, it’s annoying, but the situation is a lot better than it used to be. Even Linux is doing fine, at least if you stick to recent releases. Some distros like to ship outdated software for some reason :/
Still, in my opinion, the quality-of-life improvements of a HiDPI display very much outweigh the occasional inconvenience. Though obviously, YMMV.
[1] https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5....
[2] Assuming you’re viewing at optimal distance.
[3] With the notable exception of 96dpi native pixel art.
4K has exactly 4 times as many pixels as 1080p, so it shouldn’t be an issue in theory. Nearest-neighbor will give you exactly what you want.
However in practice you need to force scaling in software, otherwise graphic drivers, and most monitor’s postprocessing, tends to default to bicubic scaling. That said, pixel art is not computationally expensive, so it’s mostly just an inconvenience.
[4] You can use advanced scaling algorithms to upscale 1080p to 4K and it usually looks great. E.g. MPV with opengl-hq profile or MadVR on Windows. For that you’ll need something a notch over integrated graphics though, e.g. RX 560, GTX 1050 and on mobile Ryzen 2500U or equivalent.
[5] http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-HD-4000-Mobile-12...
I'm with you on accurately calibrated monitors though! God most of them suck out of the box.
Both displays are around 200 pixels per inch, plus or minus. It's great not having to see the pixels, so much more pleasant and easy on the eyes.
Also the combination of a portrait display with the landscape display is really nice. I can read an entire PDF page without scrolling.
The original Windows "standard display" was assumed to be around 96 DPI. That's the monitor that 100% scaling (i.e. no scaling) is intended for. Round the 96 up to 100 and we can say that in rough terms, the percentage scaling should be in the neighborhood of the monitor's DPI.
So monitors in the 200 DPI range are best at around 200% scaling.
A 28" 4K UHD has 157 DPI, so I wouldn't want to try it at 100% scaling - ouch. It ought to be running in the 150-175% scaling range.
The idea with a high-DPI monitor isn't to make everything smaller on the screen, it's to make everything sharper and more detailed. When you double the DPI and scale appropriately, you get four times the number of pixels for everything you put on the screen.
That’s not how it works. Lower dpi does not somehow give you more real estate!
You should still be running with ~200% scaling because you are viewing it at a greater distance.
Optimal viewing distance, assuming 16:9 ratio, is 120 cm vs 140 cm for 24" vs 28", respectively[1]. Accounting for the difference gets you ~155 ppd with both monitors[2][3], maintaining 25.0° horizontal viewing angle.
The closer your viewing distance the more ppi you need for the same density. That 28" is not inferior to the 24", when you account for distance, despite the lower ppi, because the greater viewing distance makes the pixels look smaller, thus creating more dense image.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_size
[2] http://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDens2In.html#find:density,pxW:38...
[3] http://phrogz.net/tmp/ScreenDens2In.html#find:density,pxW:38...
Also, apps that don't scale properly are a pain haha.
You need a higher PPI to make anti-aliasing work on screen (finally looking nearly as nice as print).
I’m not being sarcastic. The last time there was a thread like that on HN a bunch of people figured out they need glasses.
I have a 4K @ 24in monitor (180ppi) and a 267 ppi netbook and when I switch between them the 4K starts looking like a blurry mess!
Don't get me wrong, I can see a difference, but not nearly as night and day, especially when it comes at the cost of other features (eg refresh rate... which isn't the end of the world for coding so if it's the only thing you do on the monitor it could be worse... otherwise ouch my eyes.)
What scaling is that? 200% scaling is what you should have, 4K is exactly 4x as many pixels as FullHD. If someone is using lower scaling then they are trading sharpness for virtual space.
Its fair advice, but some eyesight issues cannot be solved with glasses.. if they can be solved at all.
Also worth noting that with TVs the distance matters a lot. With monitors, laptops, and gadgets it is relatively stable.
Maybe as the price comes down and more transistors end up in basic chipsets we'll see 2 and 3 heads of 4K displays become common.
I wouldn't trade my three 1080P 24" panels for 4K panels, unless the goal was to sell the 4K panels and rebuy the 1080P 24" panels. I don't do a lot of gaming anymore, but they're hardly a horrible experience in that regard either.
I think at this point in the market, I'm going to stick with 16:9 native resolutions. If I do any swaps, I'll probably try out dual 27" 4K panels (also 16:9, great for 1080P content), with one mounted below the other. That'll be pretty nice in time as 4K becomes better supported.
Of note, 8GB is most popular with 1920x1080 resolution.
Moreover, even apps that do support HiDPI often look like crap at 125% scaling -- the default setting on Windows 10 for most 1920x1080 laptops these days. And if you go up to 150%, you only get 1280x720 effective pixels. That's even less information density than 1366x768. Most legacy Windows apps expect to be able to use at least 768 vertical pixels.
The search turned out to be more difficult than I expected, because most high-end PC laptops with good build quality had already transitioned to 1920x1080 by early 2016. I finally found the perfect model for my father and told him that he should expect to use it for a long, long time since it's the last laptop that will ever support his apps. Fortunately, it's a well-built Broadwell i5 with a number of upgradable components, so it should last well into the early 2020s.
A friend of mine is thinking about buying a new laptop. We were looking together at what's available in the sub 400 Euro range, basically everything is 4 GB and 1366x768. Add some 200/300 Euro and 8 GB and 1080p start to appear in the lists. Guess what people buy most? The cheapest stuff.
By the way, the new laptop must be Windows because anything different will be too difficult to cope with after 30 years of training. He's replacing the old one (only 2 years old) is getting too slow. Probably a malware party but disinfecting that machine it's a hopeless effort. That one and the previous ones were periodically cleaned and/or reinstalled but there is no way to change those ingrained clicking habits. No adblocker because my friend wants to see ads and they could actually be useful in his business. I told him that he'll be back with a slow PC soon and that he's wasting his money, and I've been wasting my time.
why would you need that much ram? are you running 3+ VMs all the time?
My daily machine at home is still a 2011 Macbook Air with 4GB of RAM, which is admittedly not enough. My work machine was a 2012 Retina MBP with 8GB which was PLENTY for all of my everyday needs except when running VMs. To this day, 8GB is enough for 'most' uses, and my work machines only have 16 to get me over that "8gb-is-not-quite enough" hump. But I've got retina displays everywhere, and a 5k iMac at home. No clue how much memory it has, to be honest, but 32 is insane for not just the average user but even most power users unless they have really specific needs.
https://www.amazon.com/Performance-HP-Quad-Core-Processor-Gr...
This is the weirdest part for me, as I've myself never met a person who'd like to see ads. Installing an adblocker seems to usually be a relevation for people.
Possibly a good candidate for just doing a reformat?
Most just don't have a choice. Plenty of laptop models top out at 8GB,with 16GB either being confined to larger form-factor machines, or being so outrageously expensive that no-one in their right mind would bother.
I mean, look at the current line of macbook pros, you simply can't get 16GB without going up to the 15-inch model.
Could the chart be reporting CSS pixels rather than hardware pixels? Macs are only 7% of total Firefox users but the majority of Mac hardware has a "Retina" display with a higher resolution than these.
BTW, 2560x1440 is listed with about ~1% but it's not visible because the line and text is black on a black background.
EDIT: https://www.asus.com/us/ROG-Republic-Of-Gamers/ROG-SWIFT-PG3... 100Hz is awesome, even for just browsing the web.
Exact model:
Great monitor though. Both for gaming and for general usage.
My main computer has 8GB RAM. I don't know why I would need more than that. Right now I have firefox with 15 tabs, qt creator and 3 terminals open and I'm only using 2.5 GB of RAM. Unless I suddenly wanted to get into heavy video editing I don't think I'll feel the need to upgrade soon.
I think a good SSD and GPU are much more important than having a lot of RAM if you want to improve general user experience.
It's included in the university fees and there's no way of opting out of it, so I had to take it. Not only do they overcharge us for it, finding a seller is hard for it too, so I decided to wipe it clean and use it as my daily driver.
I've used for years a CoreDuo system+4GB with Firefox then PaleMoon playing videos in FullHD on 23 and 27 inches monitors, and never got even close to hit the swap partition unless I was running virtual machines or heavy games. Now I'm on a i5 Debian+XFCE with 8gigs, one Waterfox (privacy oriented Firefox derivative, thanks to the HN user who pointed me at it) instance with 4 tabs opened and a shell with 2 tabs; here's free output:
~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8037636 1194044 4182928 187332 2660664 6555172
Swap: 8249340 0 8249340
~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 8037636 1453204 3761776 280824 2822656 6202520
Swap: 8249340 0 8249340
[1] ~$ uname -svo
Linux #1 SMP PREEMPT RT Debian 4.9.30-2+deb9u5 (2017-09-19) GNU/Linux
(a bit older RT kernel needed for low latency audio)Works great on my iPhone X and iMac Pro? Perfect!
Unless you just need your monitor for gaming. New gen temporal aliasing mostly makes up for the lack of pixels.
SSDs have an order of magnitude faster random access performance (both read & write) and you can measure that. NVMe drives additionally increase parallelism by a significant margin. Typical workloads are very sensitive to this metric. At least at cold boot you should see significant improvement in performance.
Font rendering, likewise, you can just see[1]. See the full page[2] for more examples.
If you have good eyesight, you will see a difference. I could see how 4K to “retina” (>260 PPI) might not be worth paying extra to some (though I personally want the highest PPI I can afford), but 96 PPI to ~185 PPI is a world of difference. It goes from blurry to sharp.
That’s not all—because LoDPI text rendering often involves subpixel rendering techniques, HiDPI also brings significant improvement in contrast.
For crying out loud, some people even get headaches from the blurry subpixel rendering! [3]
[1] https://www.eizo.be/eizo-pixeldichte-im-zeitalter-von-4k-e5....
[2] https://www.eizo.be/knowledge/monitor-expertise/understandin...
[3] https://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/text-customization/p7.html
Maybe that’s arguing semantics, but to me a waste of money is something like a $150 HDMI cable… Or 64GB of RAM you’ll never use. Things that you can brag about but that don’t actually improve your life in any way at all.
However, the $100 extra I’ve spent on a 4K vs FullHD monitor was, I’m certain, one of the best purchasing decisions in my life.
My 4K display[1] makes spending time productively so much more pleasant, and so much less tiring, both on eyes and mind. And it just looks gorgeous.
The first time experience of watching BBC’s Planet Earth in 4K on this thing was mind-blowing. It must look absolutely incredible on an actual big screen with full range of HDR.
I also have a very cheap Chinese netbook with a 3K display (260 ppi), and I have, on occasion, used it to read books etc. I would have never even imagined doing any extended reading, of any kind, on my old laptop. The font would need to be huge to make that experience at all bearable. At least that’s an option for something like ePub or HTML, but a lot of things are available only as a PDF. On that little netbook it’s no bother to have multiple columns of tiny text on the screen, all at once, just like in a real book.
I wear glasses and with the old LowDPI devices I was always unsure if I need a new prescription or if it’s just the crappy display.
As for SSD I can strongly recommend getting one in addition to your HDD. For my workstation, I’m running a bcache setup (in writeback) with a 60GB old SATA3 SSD + 1TB HDD RAID1 and I’ve been extremely pleased with that so far.
I can only tell I’m not running an actual 1TB SSD right after I do a major upgrade. It takes at least one cold boot to promote files in the boot path to cache[2]. Every time that happens it reminds me just how much faster SSDs are for certain things.
Nevertheless, you almost get to have your cake and eat it too. Bcache (or dm-cache, a fine choice as well) will intelligently sync all the randomly accessed and most used data with the SSD and stream anything bigger (like movies etc.) directly to/from the HDD.
In writeback mode it will also use the SSD to buffer random writes, until they can be written sequentially, all-at-once, to the backing device.
It makes both your SSD and HDD so much more valuable. Strongly recommended :)
[1] http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-24UD58-B-4k-uhd-led-monitor
[2] It’s something that could be solved, though. An explicit interface to promote certain extents would do the trick. So far I think only bcacheFS offers something like that.
That’s why I have an adamant rule about never trying hardcore drugs or displays capable of refresh rates higher than 60 Hz.
Yes. The laptop I keep by the TV has 4GB of RAM, a 1366x768 screen, and a quad-core Celeron, that I think is some descendant of one of the Atom families. I tend to keep 10 or fewer tabs open, avoid sites that use really heavy Javascript (well, I do that anyhow...), and usually don't have much else besides a Bash window running. It's got a spinning-rust drive, and swapping would be very obvious. With my usage patterns, it doesn't swap. Performance-wise, it's a fair bit nicer than my phone, at least.
The screen issue does bug me though. Not just a haxxor feature anymore, all basic Windows users can leverage the split-screen capability to put two applications side by side - on a 720p screen, there really isn't enough screen space to practically do this. I think 1080x1920 or at least 900x1600 should be the standard for 2018.
The laptop I'm typing this on is exactly that: A Lenovo Ideapad from 2010 with 4GB and 1366x768 resolution, running Bunsenlabs Linux and the latest Waterfox (Firefox fork with telemetry removed). It's blazing fast even without a SSD; the browser starts in the blink of an eye and it takes nearly 70 tabs open to start slowing down.
Yes, the resolution can be limiting for some websites, but most are designed well enough to work fine on it. In fact, on text-heavy sites like HN I find myself browsing at 120% magnification for less eye strain. I couldn't imagine what 1080p or higher on a 15" screen would feel like, but it would likely be painful. It's actually more comfortable to read on than my iPad mini for that reason as well, and of course typing is a dream compared to any other laptop I've used, to say nothing of klunky touchscreen keyboards.
Granted, it would be slower with a more bloated Linux distro and certainly was with Windows 7, but when it comes to the OS I prefer minimalist and stable to kitchen sink and bleeding edge.
Subjective. Depends entirely on the settings you are using and the resulting frame rate at that resolution.