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.
