Hacker News Reader

Comment by ntnsndr | Hacker News Reader

I don't see it. I recently bought a System76 laptop, in honest competition with a comparable (and comparably priced) machine from a huge corporation. I ended up going for S76 based on better battery life and better design, plus the benefits of open firmware and excellent hardware integration with Linux. No regrets. I also got my employer to buy me a S76 desktop at work.

At home, though, I do run a slightly modified old Dell desktop that I bought on Craigslist for basically nothing, and for daily work I much much prefer it to any laptop. So yeah, old desktops and S76 FTW.

View on HN

> I don't see it. I recently bought a System76 laptop, in honest competition with a comparable (and comparably priced) machine from a huge corporation. I ended up going for S76 based on better battery life and better design, plus the benefits of open firmware and excellent hardware integration with Linux. No regrets. I also got my employer to buy me a S76 desktop at work.

I really want to want a System76 laptop, but I just can't bring myself to get one because of the 16:9 screens [1].

[1] 16:9 screens are another one of the computing marketplace's shitty regressions over the last decade. General purpose computers should have 16:10 or 3:2 screens, but unfortunately the number of models that have one is very small.

Curious, what's the difference between the aspect ratios, in your experience? I've been using 16:9s for a long time now. Off the top of my head, I'd say that 16:9 favours entertainment uses, while a "taller" aspect ratio would favour text-heavy tasks. I use a one-window-at-a-time approach when programming, so screen specifics have relatively little effect on me.

For 1080p screens, on the vertical you only have 1080 pixels which is pitiful once you subtract 300px worth of start menu, title bars, menu bars, ribbons, status bars, url bars. Even with higher resolution it looks like a letterbox.

Additionally, like you said, for text, you ideally want windows with portrait aspect ratios - but if you split a fullHD 16:9 screen in two, your portrait windows only have 960 pixels of horizontal resolution which is not enough for many IDEs (or e-mail clients or spreadsheets).

On a 28 inch 4K screen 16:9 is not a problem - you can have 3 long vertical text windows next to each other, or ultra-wide spreadsheets, or a combination thereof. On a 13 inch laptop screen it is a different story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com