It looks nice. But if you ask me to describe what a "linux dream laptop" would have, a 16:10 screen would definitely be up there.
What I'm looking for in a laptop has also evolved, it's no longer (just) raw power but battery life, how noisy the fan is, how hot it gets under load, etc... Not sure how the intel chipset handles all this. I'll wait for more in-depth reviews.
I’d take it a step further and suggest 3:2. Yes, more pixels (for matching X-dimension pixels) means more power draw, but you get a slightly increased height which is valuable real estate. And that small bump won’t be that much more noticeable when watching media full screen compared to 16:10. 4:3 offers much more, but it gets a bit silly and letterboxing would get pretty heavy, and if you want to HiDPI the display at 2x, that’s a ton more pixels compared to the sibling ratios.
4:3 is what you want. That's what all laptops used prior to ~ 2002 or so. You only get "letterboxing" if you view content specifically designed for wide screens; i.e. movies. I don't do that often.
Maybe 1:1 is what you really want, but I've never seen such a laptop :)
Have a few old IBM Thinkpads around the house (courteous of the parents) with 4:3. First things I ever tried Linux on. They’re nice, but they add some depth to the machine that I’m not the biggest fan of (tends to make the device a square). Obviously there are other factors at play, such as the dimensions of the screen in relation to other models choosing different resolution ratios.
Been around a few Surface models, and the 3:2 is pretty nice. I chose to stick with the traditional 16:9 FHD resolution width marker as it’s arguably the most common width for online content in the consumer video space, most common display width, and makes downscaling from 16:9 UDH rather easy. I’d rather have some extra horizontal padding than have the video "squished" or "stretched"(not literally) to fit the display appropriately as it won’t be 1:1 pixels.
Of course, you can always go the Apple/Microsoft way and choose a non-preexisting 16:9 based resolution. But as one who has previously dealt with a lot of video work, I much prefer getting those 1:1 visuals, no resizing needed. Personal preference, and yes, no such display exists to my knowledge in a consumer device. Most people don’t notice or care about this specific topic.
For the longest time I was using a Thinkpad X41 with a 12.1" 1024x768 4:3 ratio screen as basically a glorified web browser, VNC client and ssh terminal, and it worked great
About ten years ago when widescreen was catching on I argued that it's the wrong shape for a computer monitor. I have no idea what the best shape is, but I argued that 4:3 was better. I had a single 5:4 panel myself. When it came time to upgrade it I was forced to go 16:9 as there were simply no affordable options out there. It looks like I was right, though. Hopefully we get some good 3:2, 4:3 or 5:4 panels soon, and ones designed as monitors too, not TVs.
After being used to 1600x1200, going to 1920x1080 seemed to be going backwards, even though its technically more pixels, and this was circa year 2000. Maybe personally preferences are affected by how close or far apart our individual eyes are set relative to one another.
20 years on, and there's no chance I'm buying a 1080p laptop no matter the other ideals behind it. If they're targeting the higher end laptop market with lower end specs, I don't think there's not going to be much of a market for them.
As long as the vertical resolution is good, widescreen just means more space for side by side windows.
I run my 4K 27" desktop monitor at 150% scaling, and usually snap two windows side by side, sometimes up to four windows with corner snapping. It's like having two portrait mode monitors side by side.
On my laptop, the 1366x768 screen lacks the resolution to do this. Vertical resolution is the key, no matter the form factor.
There's a limit to the amount of useful horizontal space, though. I have two 16:9 monitors now and already the far extent of each screen is a bit too far away. If I added a third I'd have to move my chair over to be able to see it. On the other hand, there's plenty of available vertical space that these monitors can't take advantage of.
Sure, you only want to turn your head so far, and two 16:9 screens side-by-side or a single ultrawide monitor seems to be the practical limit, also in regards to desk space.
Swivel/tilt/pivot and multi-monitor brackets make for great flexibility, though. I've seen setups with a 4K monitor flanked by two smaller vertically oriented screens. Or you could stack monitors on top of each other, or a combination.
The biggest setup I've seen at a desk was six 4K monitors, arranged three wide and two tall. When you've got a lot of monitoring to show at once...
i think anything boxy is antiquated. you can always swivel your monitor for more vertical real estate. being able to look at two windows side by side i think is more valuable than increasing vert at the expense of horz.
all this 1x1 and 4:3 business just sounds like hipster nostalgia to me. granted I'm not a programmer, but we're not all programmers either. it's almost as if there's some virtue signaling going on there. oh the desire to be different in a mass produced world.
I always had two windows side by side on my 5:4 screen. On 16:9 I have three windows side by side, which isn't as useful, and I lose several lines of text. It's not a hipster thing. I've been saying widescreen is stupid for monitors since before everyone had them. I have widescreen in my living room, though.
Which resolutions are/were those monitors? I've only ever seen 5:4 monitors in 1280x1024, so a 16:9 monitor at 1920x1080 would give you slightly higher vertical resolution and some nice additional horizontal space.
Two windows side by side on 1280x1024 are 640 pixels wide each, on 1920x1080 three windows are the exact same width each, plus you get an additional 56 pixels of vertical resolution, so in fact more lines of text.
And of course once you go to 2560x1440 or 3840x2160, you either get oodles of space or sharper text, thanks to display scaling.
I miss the old 4:3 laptops. The last one I had was an old Dell Vostro and it was great for software development, since I prefer vertical space for code than side-by-side windows/applications. Nowadays, I rarely use the full width except for watching full screen videos.
Now, I run Linux on a Dell XPS 15 (3840x2400 with a 1.5 fractional HiDPI scale) and it’s acceptable, but still feels a little vertically cramped.
Personally I'd prefer something even wider, maybe 2:1, ideal for viewing two windows side-by-side (my normal working mode). I suspect 16:9 hits a sweet spot for a lot of people, and it's the default for most video (except films, which are usually wider).
More than one lane seems to be ideal. I'm assuming running 3:2 like in the early 2000s, everyone these days is running full screen and alt-tabbing constantly??
I like some things full-screen, like my browser, but vim (ok technically full-screen itself, but split) always 2-3, probably most other things 2 side by side.
But I don't have a square monitor (I think it's 16:9) I don't see why that would be an improvement. If anything surely we want it wider for side by side use, so more 'lanes' can fit?
On my 5:4 screen I would regularly split it into 4: 2 up, 2 down. This was perfect. A lot of inferior window managers seem to restrict splitting to only in one axis, and even two only two windows. It's lame.
I'm on bspwm, so I can split all I want. But split 3 lanes seems to be nice for my workflow right now. But a 3:2? Damn... how skinny are those windows everyone is using, or what fonts!
On 5:4 I would only have two lanes, but I could split vertically as well so I usually still had 3-4 windows at once. On 16:9 I find splitting into 3 lanes makes them slightly too narrow, but it's workable.
As for fonts, I always make my text size as small as possible on every device I own (well, the ones primarily used by me at least).
But doesn’t this make a vertical line right in front of you, making content outside of your central vision? I like my main windows to be right in front, and less important things to both sides of it - that way, I don’t have to constantly turn my head.
Having a split under your nose feels like reading a book but putting the page you’re currently reading past your ears
Hmm.. I guess, but it doesn't matter. With dual screens there is a split right in front of me. My chair swivels so I can adjust my body to make looking left or right comfortable. I've never really thought about it and don't think it's a problem. When I read a book I don't fold it back on itself, both pages are visible at once.
The problem with dream laptops is that dreams change all the time due to marketing and newness. 16:10 screen is better largely because some fancy models today come with 16:10. 5 years ago that same feature wouldn't have mattered. It's just weird.
Just like 1080p vs 1440p. 2k vs 3k vs 4k. Just like the material of the chassis, the brightness of the screen, the weight, the stiffness, the depth of keytravel, the color scheme of the background, the placement of buttons on your window, using usb-c for charging...
I mean, I could ramble for pages about ideal features. Some of those features are important to enjoying a laptop long into the future. But a lot of them are purely whatever the latest craze is. 16:10 screen imo is of the later category.
You need to accept people have other needs than you do.
Brightness of screen is important if you're not always in an optimally-lit environment. I work from home, I like moving around and going to work at cafes for 1-2 hours. My 250 nits thinkpad, for all the great things it has, can be a pain to use in some circumstances.
Telling me I want 16:10 because the fanzy macs have it is belittling. I want 16:10 because I want to see more lines at once when coding on emacs. Depending on what I work on, I even split my windows horizontally.
Even bundling together usb-c for charging with the color scheme of the background is... puzzling. Surely you can see how some people would like to have only one charger to carry around for all their electronic?
If I had to guess, you have a dedicated desk and don't use any computer outside of it. That's a cool setup, but not everybody can or want to do that.
While we're making requests, I'd also love if they got rid of this bizarre keyboard layout where the up arrow key is to the left of the (tiny) right shift.
> battery life, how noisy the fan is, how hot it gets under load
These are also very important factors for me as well. That's the reason I run my laptops with the cpu governor set to battery saving mode. Since for the work I do CPU is rarely the bottleneck, I get better battery life and I can never hear the fans.
I once plugged my Linux thinkpad into a projector via HDMI during a programming interview, and my laptop started smelling like it was burning. Never again!
I had such trouble getting Ubuntu to run in 1920x1080 in my VM, which I found absolutely puzzling, but maybe this is because linux people find 16:9 passé.
I've been using a Matebook X Pro (from Huawei) for the past three years and I have to agree: a 3:2 ratio (at 3000x2000 resolution) is amazing. I've been slowly looking around for a newer machine for work, but honestly most screens suck in comparison.
The HP Spectre x360 14 may be what you’re looking for - it has a 3:2 aspect ratio and options for both an OLED screen (better color, worse battery life) or regular LCD screen (built in electronic privacy filter, better battery life).
I've been pondering getting the 15 inch Spectre, I just can't get over the weird placement of the touchpad and the keyboard including a numeric pad. I know it's silly, but it's just... why make something so pretty then make it asymmetric? It's bizarre.
What I'm looking for in a laptop has also evolved, it's no longer (just) raw power but battery life, how noisy the fan is, how hot it gets under load, etc... Not sure how the intel chipset handles all this. I'll wait for more in-depth reviews.