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.
Monitors took a huge step backwards in the switch from CRTs to LCDs.
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.
Maybe I've never used good CRTs? They have always given me migraines. I was seriously considering whether I needed to give up on being a developer because I wasn't sure I could continue to work with computers around the time LCDs started taking over.
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.
One thing I noticed is that many Americans had their CRTs at a 60Hz refresh rate. That instantly hurt my eyes so bad I couldn't look at the screen for more than a few seconds without them hurting a lot. Yet the Americans were completely impervious to this.
In Europe there was legislation mandating a minimum refresh rate of 72Hz and I ran all my monitors at 85Hz.
Yep, the average bundled CRT was pretty terrible and far below the average bundled LCD.
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.
Well said... I miss my old 21" CRT that had higher resolution than my current LCDs. (1920x1200 vs 1920x1080). Damn HD TV's for ruining the resolution craze.
The switch happened more than 2 or 3 years ago. My ~$600 2004 LCDs had similar or better color, the same DPI, and a response time that was fast enough for anything short of FPS games, and that was against my beloved FD Trinitron. My ~$800 2007 LCDs beat CRTs on pretty much everything by a large margin.
So did I. Though not as insane as RMS. I wonder though, why would he hate 16:9. Personally I like more width as I split Vim buffer vertically or tile more windows in that direction.
My dislike is that it loses a bunch of vertical space.
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.
Widescreen is also quite awkward in a portrait format, which I really liked with some old 1600x1200 displays, especially once you hit 3 monitors or more. Very nice vertical resolution, and you don't run into the "surveying my lordly domain" problem. Sure, a high enough resolution would be okay, too, as I wouldn't care as much whether I'd look at two 1200x1600 monitors side-by-side or one widescreen monitor with a 1600-ish v-res, but in all these years. there are only a few monitors that go beyond 1920/1600x1200, and most of them are ridiculously overpriced.
Right now it's Samsung SyncMaster 2443s. The trick is to go into the font stuff and explain the LCD layout to the font renderer. I think MacOS already does this but on Linux it's usually somewhere in Appearance.
I also think 4x3 is better than 16:9 but market forces have made the latter the best option. One can get a 16:9 screen that's wider, taller, cheaper and better overall quality than basically any 4x3 screen.
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.
Wide is fine, but we used to have 16:10 screens with the same horizontal resolution available as the current crop of 16:9 monitors. Now they're becoming extinct.
