I would purchase today except there doesn't seem to be any screen options higher than 1080. I can't go back to 1080 after years of 4k monitors and mbp retina for work and x1 carbon 2k screen on personal laptop.
Supposedly the fhd (1080p approx) has much better battery life. I regret getting the 4k screen. For OP above, what's your battery life like? Mine is so bad I keep thinking something must be broken. I'm not doing compiling all day either, doing small things in bash, not killing the cpu, web pages.
I'm with you. I much prefer using my older non-Retina 16:10 displays than my newer 16:9 Retina display. Microscopic pixels are nice, but an extra 10% height is huge.
I really appreciate with System76 is doing and if I were in the market for a laptop I'd consider this. Their desktops are very cool too as they custom-build the cases themselves. They do seem to be in kind of a "no man's land" market-wise, where a lot of people who would want Linux are technically savvy enough to build their own computer or install it on an existing laptop. But I hope they keep it up and hit their stride!
I agree. 1080p on a 27" or even a 24" is pretty bad, but on a 14" is essentially "retina" at normal working distances.
Certainly a 4K would be somewhat smoother, but at the cost of battery life, the need to fiddle with display scaling, etc. I just don't see it being worth it. 2K at most for a display of that size.
Now, a 4K at 32" would be a nice external monitor, and would give plenty of screen real estate (and yet would have a lower PPI than a 1080p at 14").
I've run 1080p at 14" on previous laptops and had no issues with 1:1 pixel scaling. Sure, things are a little squinty but I never felt the need to zoom the UI. I also never felt like things were too pixelated. So yeah, 1080p/14" really is the sweet spot.
That's actually quite exciting to hear. I run Ubuntu on a 34" 3440 x 1440, and it's been a major step-up from dual 27" 1080p displays, but it has made me wonder what is the optimal display for programming.
4K at 32" seems to be pretty close to the most pixels you can fit into a display without either a) making the display so big it becomes unwieldy, or b) making the pixels so small that you have to use display scaling to see anything.
> Gnome allows you to specify the scaling of individual apps (if you edit their launch shortcuts), so depending on the app I can run 1:1, 125% or 150%
Oh, that's a useful trick.
> So yeah, 1080p/14" really is the sweet spot.
Yep, in general (i.e. typical home office use as well as programming) I would say that displays with a density between 120-150ppi are probably ideal for desktop use, whereas a density between 140-170 is right for laptops.
huh, I have 4K 27" and I still see a bit too much pixels to my taste
I have a 2018 MacBook Air (Retina) I use for testing. The display is beautiful. I’m very familiar with running and tweaking MacOS. And honestly I don’t like it. I don’t like fighting with how Apple feels you should be allowed to use -their- hardware. I am way more productive in Linux now that I’m used to it.
Even though Linux may not scale resolution as good as a Mac or Windows yet, being able to fit more text on the screen is huge for productivity.
When you factor in new gaming options like Stadia or Nvidia Now, where you can game high end stuff without the high end hardware locally, FHD is just disappointing.
I wouldn't say it's the best option for everyone but if you need a machine with discrete GPU and high resolution that you know for sure will run Linux (many gaming laptop have similar spec but non supported RAID setup) then I'd say go for it.
If you want a portable laptop then dell's developer edition got 4k and good specs.
Apple laptops are barely usable at 16:10, it's night and day compared to 3:2 on Surface Books (my favorite laptop of all time by far).