It's a breath of fresh air to read of someone that
- cut his resources burning in half,
- is more productive with a smaller screen than before, and
- sleeps like a log at night
(his 3 last blog posts!)
- cut his resources burning in half,
- is more productive with a smaller screen than before, and
- sleeps like a log at night
(his 3 last blog posts!)
Too much processing power, too much memory and storage. Too many data centers, bandwidth. We lost all sense of traction and we're running wild trying to fill up all the extra space and burn up all the extra resources. Software is currently way more complicated than it needs to be, and it makes it overall excessively insecure as well.
I've said this before, and it's becoming official this fall. I'm getting out of the wheel. I wish I had the competence of Marginalia's author to brave this storm. But my vessel is making water fast and I need to make landfall. Next month I embark on a new stint in academia hoping to change direction for good.
There might be an argument that education has never been the primary responsibility of the academy; that it's institutional responsibility is on "learning" not "education." If your goals are primarily research oriented there's still room to do that, especially in STEM.
Or tiling window managers with virtual workspaces. When most applications I use are two keystrokes away, the need for more than one screen seriously lessens. Besides, looking at a screen on the side hurts my neck.
I've had 3 monitors at one point on my main dev box of which 2 were 32" 4K. It became tiring very fast. I went to a single one. First it was 40" 4K but it proved to be too much neck bending to look at. So I've finally settled to a single 32" 4K and am happy (I use it at 100% scaling). Smaller monitors - no thanks, not my cup of tea. I know it is possible and I used to program on tiny ones in my young days but fuck it. Do not want to go back.
In terms of size I use 28" and that works well for me, 14" on the laptop is fine too but feels a bit limited now and then. In the long term I'll probably go for something inbetween with a size ratio closer to 4:3.
I found something with an effective resolution of about 2560x1440 to be a sweet spot, where I can fit windows needed for a single task in one screen. Provided those windows don’t waste too much space with unnecessary stuff of course.
I quickly realized I absolutely hate setups with multiple monitors, when I was given one at work. I quickly gave back my second monitor, because it just made it worse for me, and additionally wasted space on my desk. If you want to improve my circumstances at work, give me a bigger monitor, not more of them.
(I've never even tried multiple monitors. I could immediately think of several reasons why they would not be an improvement for me, so made a quick decision in 1998 and moved on.)