On 5/25/07, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Some points of agreement with Andrew... On May 24, 2007, at 11:06 PM, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: >> Does anyone have a wide-screen (16:9, 10:6, ..) format and regret it? > > It depends. How much do you truly value "portability"? > > If you just move from desk to desk with it then there won't be any > issue. If, however, you're like me and it gets hauled with you to > do presentations and stuff, then weight matters. Display size == > glass == weight. Personally, I love my 15" PowerBook, and will only replace it with a 15" MacBook Pro, for two reasons. One, I am really happy with Mac as my primary environment, which is somewhat off-topic here. Two, and most relevant to this thread, is that I have found I LOVE the 16:10
16:10? I'd love to see that! :) Probably means 16:9... widescreen ratio. I was a bit worried at first about using it with
my primary applications, which tend to want more vertical space than horizontal (e-mail, web, documents, coding, etc.), but I find it actually works out quite nicely, especially if you toss things like panels off on one of the screen edges instead of keeping them at the top or bottom edge. >> I see resolutions like 1280x800 and 1680x1050. The latter sounds >> especially nice to me -- I tend to use multiple windows and like the >> real estate. Anybody have negative experiences with such res? > > The only issue is that the pixels get smaller. As long as you can > scale the icons/fonts in Your Favorite Window Manager, it's no big > deal. One of the engineers at my last job was so proud of his Dell laptop with a 15" widescreen display that did 1920x1600 resolution. He then spent the entire time using it squinting at the screen like a blind man. When I told him he could scale the fonts up, and he did, Windows XP's GUI just started looking absolutely retarded. Linux/Unix and X, however, make it more of a "whole display" thing rather than just applying to fonts. When you're running, say, a 15" display at 1920x1600 (which, BTW, is pretty damned awesome), Xorg should automatically figure out the proper resolution. You can see this in the X log output, but you can also determine what X thinks it is by using 'xdpyinfo'. On my Powerbook, which is currently driving an external display, a couple pages into the output of xdpyinfo, I find: screen #0: dimensions: 1920x1200 pixels (648x401 millimeters) resolution: 75x76 dots per inch It's what X refers to as the resolution that determines the scaling. Taking that number (which is likely very reliable, as it's determined by the dimensions, which are probed from the display itself), you can adjust font scaling system-wide by editing the "default-resolutions" setting in /etc/X11/fs/config (if you're running a distro that uses the X Font Server instead of built-in font support, which I believe is all of them now.) So, in short, Linux actually deals _better_ with scaling issues for any given display than Windows. >> What do people think is a good overall screen size? What's the max >> that >> is still convenient to carry around, and actually fit on one's >> lap? See >> previous question re wide-screen. > > 15.1" is probably as big as you want, and it's normally pretty > hefty unless you get a thin laptop. I see people carry around 17" and larger notebooks once in a while, but I consider them crazy. Unless it's your portable photo/video rig or your desktop replacement rig, it's Too Big. I'm with Andrew on the 15"-ish being about right-sized (if you're talking wide-screen, otherwise it's ~14" for 4:3 displays.) I do really like what I see in the 12" category, though, and keep wishing that Apple would issue a MacBook Pro 12" to replace the 12" PowerBook they retired... All that power in a subnotebook size was wonderful, especially if you had a big display on your desk. Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
-- Mark Schoonover, CMDBA [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 619-368-0099 * software development * systems/database administration * networking * security * -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
