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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

They're probably suggesting to get a bigger monitor at the same time. You can have somewhat higher DPI and smoother text, and more real estate.

If you're used to 24" 1080P, going to 32" 4K gets you 1.5x the DPI and 1.77x the screen area. For what's now a $300 monitor, that is a pretty significant improvement overall.

The DPI means my characters go from 9x18 pixels to 13x27, which is a big difference in text rendering fidelity and just feels a little nicer. And the additional screen real estate speaks for itself.

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Personally I think 24" 4k displays (along the lines of https://amzn.com/B00PC9HFNY or https://amzn.com/B01LPNKFK0/) look a lot better than 32" 4K displays. YMMV.

Though if you have the space (a very deep empty desk) to put your display like 6 feet away from your face, then the 32" might be a decent way to reduce eye strain.

They will do for sure since you can run them with 200% scaling. That scaling factor gives you the cleanest fonts. Fractional scaling is not as good.

I’m using a 27" screen with 4K which is ok. But I would definitely upgrade to 5k to get 200% scaling once display standards properly support it (Thunderbolt 3 will not be a permanent solution) and screens are affordable

I also went with a good 27" instead of a cheap 32", but mine is 200% scaling. I figure this will become a secondary monitor I can use for a very long time.

I'll buy a 32" with no bezel when I can get it with a Thunderbolt 4 port, and my desk will be right about maxed out.

I'm wondering what you mean by "Thunderbolt 3 will not be a permanent solution".

I had gotten the vague impression that Thunderbolt 3 is in line to be adopted more-or-less whole-cloth as USB4. Is that not accurate?

Thunderbolt is much more than an just a display link. You can think of it as something as PCI Express, plus some USB and displayport compatibility. It can technically support everything, but might require custom drivers. I don't expect it to become a mainstream solution for "just pushing down some pixels from A to B" due to its additional complexity and cost.

I haven't followed USB4 too much. I expect it to again have multiple "levels" like USB had before. And whether some or all of those will be high definition video capable it to be seen. For USB-C video was just a mere alternate mode which switched the meaning of the wires inside the cables to displayport. Doing video over the PCI Express subsystem of thunderbolt is a different story.

TB3 can embed displayport, even 1.4 with latest versions (allowing for 8k video, though if I remember correctly, it was 60Hz using only one of the "fake" techniques like compression or interlacing, not sure exactly which). The hard bit is finding which chipset a particular device uses and if it will do 8k (more recent ones) or not.

If 8k is supported, so is 5k, which is kinda getting mainstream.

USB4 will definitely be high definition video compatible, that much we know.

From reading this[0] it looks like USB4 and TB3 will be broadly compatible, modulo the usual sort of tiresome licensing and compatibility BS our industry loves to burden us with. Pity.

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-4-faq,38766.html

I'm already using a 30" monitor; there aren't a lot of 4k monitors >30" that aren't full TVs (50-60"). Going to 4k at 30" just increases my DPI with no increase in area, and I'm already not using tiny fonts; more DPI isn't what I want. I'd really like 4k at 40" or so: that still bumps me from 100 DPI to 110 DPI, but I get a lot more usable screen real estate. Unfortunately, the market for monitors over 30" is tiny / costly.

Would you mind linking the $300 monitor you're talking about?

Not OP, but I've been using an older version of this monitor for about two years now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07K3P7ZBS/ref=psdc_1292115011_t1_...

There's quite a few choices at that price point, though.

https://smile.amazon.com/LG-32UK50T-W-Class-FreeSync-Monitor...

Speaking as a guy with six 4K monitors on my desk, get Samsung over LG. My two LG monitors are a bit soft, whereas the Samsungs are sharp as diamonds.

My LG is a little over 4 years old (an LG 27MU67, sadly no longer produced), and the only complaint I have with it is that the capacitive buttons are difficult to use by feel. If I could get another monitor that's exactly the same, I'd do it in an instant.

I have a similar LG 27UD68. The game changer for me was taking off the anti glare coating. It's amazing the relief from eye strain that I got once it came off.

>6 4k monitors How are you driving those by the way? 6x 4k support is an uncommon feature.

Two separate Nvidia cards, not SLA'ed.

For later reader: I've figured out I need to use the Display Port, not the HDMI port, to get true crisp 4K. Now the LGs are sharp too. :)

There's several, just search. $300 is about the cheapest you'll find a 32" 4k though, don't expect much and it'll certainly be a TN panel with a slower refresh.

Yah, you'd probably be better served to spend $350-$450.

Some of the $300 ones are VA, though, which is OK.

I've bought a million of the Dell P series 4k monitors for my office in various sizes, they range from 200-500 bucks or so depending on the size. Even less used or floor model. I have a few dozen and they've pretty much been bulletproof.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/614968/lg-32qk500-c-32-q...

I've been using this one. (Typing on it right now) Has a display port I wire my mac into when coding for work and run a Linux box on it when I'm playing. It is a nice panel, for what I paid. 32" @ 2650x1440 IPS. I've got it next to an older 30" 16:10 (2650x1600) and it is comparable.

I do wish I could get my hands on cheap 16:10 monitors. My old 24" dell is vertical, which really makes for a nice way to view the web.

I am still traped into the mess Linux wayland has brought and all I see is a blurry algamation of nlurry fonts surrounded by blurry images.

The Linux desktop is dead.

Which distro./desktop environment are you using? I'm running a dual screen setup (laptop + 4k screen over DP) with fractional scaling on the laptop screen (150%). This works pretty well in Fedora 31, no blurred text. AFAIK different scaling parameters on different screens are not supported by Xorg, so I'm pretty happy with Wayland.

Kde Plasma Wayland with fractional scaling set to 125%. My workhorse applications are Libreoffice, Firefox and Thunderbird.

Each and every of these applications is blurry as hell. My eyes hurt. True that the multi-monitor experience with mixed scaling factors per display under Wayland is better, that's why I am still suffering of that stockholm syndrom.

Gnome does better, I acknowledge that, but their opinionated UI decisions make me feel like a retard.

That's because those applications use XWayland, which means Wayland scaling has no effect and it scales the pixmaps instead. Try export GDK_BACKEND=wayland.

Not at all my experience. Honestly, wayland has been an incredibly sharp improvement over x for me.

Arch running Gnome on Wayland just freaking works. Input is miles better. Output is miles better.

I run two 4k displays and the internal display is 1920x1080. Even dragging windows between the external and internal monitor, with different scaling factors works SO much better.

Yeah that never happens on Windows..

That's odd. Maybe it's your hardware or your setup or something.

I'm on Linux, and as long as I have screen composition on in the NVidia Settings Panel and software vsync off, 4k60 is as smooth as butter and as sharp as 4k, much like OSX. It's nicer than Windows.

Thank you for that tip. I had a lot of screen tearing before I enabled that option. Do you have "Force Full Comoposition Pipeline" enabled or just "Force Composition Pipeline"?

EDIT:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA/Troubleshooting#...

That's helpful! :)

I played with Wayland and decided it is not for me.

I'm running 3x 28" 4k@60 driven from nVidia using prop driver with an Openbox at the Window manager. It is working great. Super fast, super snappy, fonts look fantastic. Same goes for video. I have one monitor dedicated to code, one monitor monitor dedicated to logs ( 6-10 tmux windows ) and one monitor used as a general workspace.

Nvidia proprietary plus Wayland is a no-go as of now. My solution to Nvidia is "just use AMD". They got decent offers for low and mid end.

Open source nvidia driver leaves quite a lot to be desired. In my setup it crashed/locked up at least weekly.

I'm running a 4K laptop -- a Lenovo C940 and it looks _beautiful_ on Windows. And the dpi is greater than the Mac's "retina" display on laptop.

If it looks as good in person as it looks on paper, that's a seriously attractive laptop.

Pity it seems to top out at 4 cores and 16GB RAM though. I might have to take a hard look at that series once it refreshes to i9...

How do you feel about the touchpad?

There's an i9 8-core model (on the 15.6 inch model). That's the one I got. I agree that the 16 GB max is disappointing. No problems with touchpad, though I'm used to Windows laptops (I don't use Macs)

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