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Comment by shadowoflight | Hacker News Reader

Eh, the only "ugh" thing about that new Alienware monitor, to me, is the low resolution - 1440p at 27"/34"? No thank you, 2160p or better + fractional scaling just looks so much better for those of us editing text and/or code all day.

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It's probably more geared towards the gaming market then. 1440p/27 inch is a sweet spot for gaming because you can actually drive that resolution at a decently high fps. Even the latest (if you can get your hands on then) gfx cards still struggle at 2160p for upwards of 100fps, whereas you can hit that in most games at 1440p even on several years old hardware now. For 34 inch I think 1440p will start to look a bit cramped, but at least it's not the usual 2560x1440, it will be 3440x1440.

Just to clarify, 34” 21:9 is the same height (and pixel density) as 27” 16:9 - and it’s definitely just on the cusp of noticeably not-pixel-dense when editing text, but I can see how it would be ideal for PC gaming where you sit a bit further back.

this right here. I went from a 1080p 24” @144Hz to a 1440p 27” @160Hz and it’s night and day. It was in that perfect sweet spot for size too, not just performance and quality. The bigger you go the further you have to sit from the screen, but 27” is just right.

200% scaling might be fine, but fractional scaling still isn't well supported on Linux. I'd prefer such a monitor, yes, if it wasn't going to limit what systems I can run.

That's totally fair! I'm still waiting on Linux to get its act together with fractional scaling, but until then, Mac works fantastic for my work with its fancy brand of fractional scaling w/ supersampling and better font rendering.

Hint hint, monitor manufacturers. Maybe your target market might become larger through some free software contributions.

Linux desktop has <2% market share. A monitor manufacturer would have to be suicidal to try fixing a platform that doesn’t even have proper support for basic features like display scaling.

1% could be the difference between breakeven and loss. I am a Linux user with 2 "low" resolution monitors, because I don't trust software support for higher resolutions, but admittedly also because 1080p is fine for me.

That’s fair, but with consumer electronics you need to sell at 2.5x BoM cost. Breakeven is death.

It’s worth mentioning that display scaling was one of many dealbreakers that made desktop Linux unusable for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490753

I’m pessimistic about any of this getting fixed in the next few years.

1440p at 27" still seems like the sweet spot to me. Image looks crisp, I don't have to turn on any janky DPI scaling features, and games actually run well.

That Alienware monitor is clearly targeted for gaming. Regular 4k is already difficult enough to achieve in AAA games, expanding that to an ultrawide aspect ratio would only make getting acceptable performance harder.

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