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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious why you think that. I mostly write code for a living and apart from the notebook line catastrophe (I'm stuck on a 2014 model of a MacBook Pro and waiting for something to come out with a reasonable keyboard and perhaps more than one port that I can use), the desktop line is improving quickly. I've been really tempted by the Mac Mini, I would buy the iMac Pro if I could afford it, and now I intend to get the iMac: as it turns out, it's pretty much the only way to get a 5K 27" monitor. I do need 5K to get three columns of code in a full-screen Emacs (4K is fine for two columns, but three is squeezing it).

So my conclusion is exactly the opposite: while I am frustrated that I have to depend on Apple, because seemingly nobody else can get their act together and produce integrated hardware+software ecosystems that work, I am quite happy with the recent direction they've taken.

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To the parent's point... I'd recommend a hackintosh Intel NUC. I got blisters stuffing RAM SIMMs into daughter cards. I've agonized over IRQ choices for peripherals. I'm so over fiddling with my daily driver. I've got Audrinos and RPi projects for scratching that itch.

Uncertainty over the keyboards is precisely why I postponed replacing my laptop.

I'd probably use my iMac more if I could find a keyboard & trackpad combo in the same form factor as my laptop's. I want the trackpad flush and centered below the keyboard. I've used cardboard wedges to fake the arrangement, but it's not the same. And since Teleport has stopped working, I haven't figured out how to use my laptop's inputs across devices. (First world problems, I know.)

I've been using Synergy in place of teleport. Not as good but gets the job done. There's a top shelf paid version but an older free version does the job for me.

https://symless.com/synergy

If you build a newer version from source you can get the best of both worlds: Free, while also not blasting your passwords across the network in plaintext

I think Synergy does what you needed with Teleport. I used it at work a while back when I had Apple devices and it worked great as long as I had the MacBook set up as the host.

I use this piece of software for Windows/MacOS mouse and keyboard sharing: http://www.keyboard-and-mouse-sharing.com/

It works reasonably well.

> I'd recommend a hackintosh Intel NUC

What models work with minimal fuss? What about updates? How do I know that an update won't replace/delete some kext that I need and brick it or break some required functionality?

I really wanted to do this a year ago - except there wasn't any hardware that seemed to answer those questions satisfactorily. In the end, the stability of knowing I can turn on the computer and start work every day without worrying about having to drop into a recovery console because an update f'd is worth more to me than a few grand.

Maybe things have changed?

Have you seen https://bullettrain.com/products/express-keyboard-platform? I have an older version of this and I love it.

I had not. Thank you!

I'm curious why you need 5K@27 for 3 columns.

I have 2x27" 4K LG's and they comfortably fit.

The effective DPI may be higher on 5K at 27" than 4K at 27" but at a reasonable distance I fail to see any difference (approx 220ppi vs 170ppi at 3 feet).

I currently use a 24" at 4K and to fit 3 columns I need to use a smaller font size, which makes the code hard to read.

I used to have a 27" at 4K, and indeed you can fit 3 columns then, but the blurry/jagged fonts annoyed me. 4K really isn't enough for 27".

My conclusion was that I need exactly 5K at 27" (and not larger, because then you have to turn your head to see everything) for coding.

Interesting, you must have excellent eyesight 170ppi at arm's length and I can see a pixel or any jaggedness.

I agree with you about size though running two 27" (on VESA mount arms) is the max I'd want for comfort as it was I had to get a 80cm deep desk to sit slight further back.

https://i.redd.it/tctxa7hs16l21.png

That desk is 120x80 and the monitors still over shadow it.

5K at 27" enables you to use 2x scaling which is much lighter on your hardware. Scaling 4K at 2x leads to a sizing which looks like 1080p (just much sharper), which may be too large depending on your distance from the screen. Using anything but 2x scaling will tax your hardware, slow down the computer and blur the image.

Read more about it here: https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/

Ah Mac.

I'm on Linux and I just use fractional font scaling (1.5 usually) and everything works fine and it has no performance impact I can discern across AMD RX at work, intel hd or rtx2080.

While it's true that fractional scaling works differently on Linux and Windows, it's my understanding that many apps don't handle scaling well, or at all, over there.

Meanwhile on macOS basically any app scales properly - I think I have never seen one that doesn't. You can use fractional scaling on a mac, but in that case your whole output will be rendered in 5K and scaled down to the target resolution, which is of course an intensive task - I wouldn't recommend it and instead always use true 2x scaling.

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