Two things struck me as particularly surprising: He's still running a (high quality) 21" CRT. And he's using Ubuntu (considering switching to Arch). Somehow I expected him to be using some sort of insane manual install maintained since the nineties.
Up until just 2 or 3 years ago I was still using a gigantic Dell CRT that I had bought from a coworker for $10. It had better color, higher DPI, higher resolution and a better response time than the expensive LCD that replaced it.
Oh, and it wasn't widescreen, which was nice.
LCDs still sometimes give me migraines (after 12+ hours), and there's a big difference between high-quality and low-quality monitors; but I would never go back. I also don't recall CRTs being better (in terms of color, DPI and resolution) than the good monitors I use today.
In Europe there was legislation mandating a minimum refresh rate of 72Hz and I ran all my monitors at 85Hz.
The higher-end CRTs (Trinitrons etc) were great, but tended to wear out over time. I'm somewhat surprised that Raymond still has one that hasn't gone blurry, as I haven't seen a nicely working one in quite a while.
I think they would line those things with lead.
1920x1080 screens have 10% less vertical space than the older 1600x1200 screens. When writing code, it would be nice to have the extra 120 pixels available to see more of the file without scrolling. When reading PDFs or ebooks I'd like to see a single large page instead of two small pages right next to each other. Same with webpages - 99.9% of websites are hard coded to be <1000 pixels wide. It's pretty rare I need to see two websites side by side, but I have to do extra vertical scrolling a million times a day.
I've never seen the benefit of tiling a bunch of windows, either. I can only concentrate on one window at a time, so, IMO, showing a million windows just adds a bunch of distraction.
Widescreen is nice for watching movies, but terrible for everything I spend time doing on the computer.
I've tried that a couple times now, and always revert to having both horizontal because rectangular pixel shapes were messing up the font rendering.
16:9 might be the best for watching films, but not for stacking windows, or preserving space for menus, or scrolling across text, or exploring graphical listings, or basically 90%+ of the activities you typically do on a computer rather than a TV.
My main set-up is a widescreen 24-inch screen in the centre and 2 19-inch old Eizo screens that I preserve since long ago (only 1280x1024 each but impressive colour and image quality). These often have virtual machines open in full screen or terminal sessions. I use one of these to dock my laptop as well, in a top-bottom arrangement. I'd much rather have a triple 4x3 if cost was comparable, but it's not and I wouldn't change my current set-up for a while unless one of the screens died.