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by rigelbm 1592 days ago
I went from 2 wide screens to a single ultra wide, and I'm never going back. It's like you have two screens (well, more like 1.5), but they are optimally positioned, and there's no bevel in the middle.

It's worth mentioning that I use i3, which helps a lot organising all that screen real state. I can see how obnoxious it could be to use it with other desktop environments.

Bonus: It's awesome for gaming. Most games support it nowadays, and it's very immersive.

Edit: The monitor -> https://www.techadvisor.com/review/aoc-agon-ag352ucg6-369041...

Edit 2: Got it at a Black Friday for £550, which was a pretty good deal. I would probably not buy it at full price.

3 comments

It depends on the game. I much prefer 24" 240Hz+ monitors for competitive reaction-based games. But yes, ultra-wide monitors are incredible for productive tasks.
> ultra-wide monitors are incredible for productive tasks

But they always seem really short? The wider they get the shorter they seem to get. Not sure why that is. Doesn't work for viewing code or text does it?

34" and 49" ultrawides are the same height as a 27" 16:9.

38" ultrawides are the same height as a 30" 16:9.

If you want something taller than that, there's also 43" 16:9 monitors, which I guess are basically just TV panels put in a different body / with different firmware.

What do you mean by "short"? Do you mean like, the monitor support structure is short?

You can put ultra-wide monitors on monitor arms; just make sure the monitor arm supports the weight of the device.

When I look on Amazon for ultra-wide, I find monitors that are for example 3840 pixels wide... which is ok... but only 1080 pixels tall?! And the wider they get the fewer rows of pixels they seem to have. My 14-inch mid-range laptop is 1964 pixels tall. My ancient standard-format monitor is 2160 pixels tall. Why are these brand-new, fully mains-powered, desktop monitors so stupidly low on pixel rows? 1080 rows isn't enough for a good amount of code or text at a reasonable resolution.
I don't know about the Windows world, but afaik Macs can't drive anything larger than 6k currently, so taking a 5k monitor and adding horizontal pixels to it doesn't work.

LG and Dell make a 34" 5k*2k monitor, but on MacOS you can't drive it at 2x because again that would be more than 6k.

Hopefully in the not so distant future the high PPI ultrawide dream will come true.

U4021QW is the only option that is wide and enough tall (and not too tall). I wish I could get 120Hz version of this.
I assume they meant the opposite of tall, I.e vertical size. And there I must agree, the ultra wide screens come of as very… wide.
Just use a large TV - curved.
Agreed, ultrawide monitors really just "heighten the contradictions" of non-tiling window managers, and show how unfit for purpose they are.
Which ultrawide and what size?

I'm confused between getting 2 27 inch 4k monitors vs a QHD (low res) 34-38 inch ultrawide.

38" 3840x1600 (109ppi) curved ultra-wide here (since five years now). It's an old monitor so by now there are better 38". I love it for software development.
AOC Agon AG352UCG6, 35", Curved, VA, 1440p, 120Hz

https://www.techadvisor.com/review/aoc-agon-ag352ucg6-369041...