This seems really cool for tiling windows managers (even Windows has tiling options, although I’m not familiar with those). That being said, I still prefer a multimonitor setup on my tiling WM of choice.
I think for most web apps it doesn’t make sense to allow the width to get so wide, except when the content being displayed is a columnar list and even then it’s a pretty marginal benefit.
What I’ve done is limit the max-width to some amount of px/chars and allowed the remaining space be empty, with an exception for when displaying tables. Even with tables, the bigger width is only beneficial if either the contents of the columns are large enough, or there are very many columns to show. The solution in my mind is limiting the column widths to the longest content.
You could go columns for the content, but I think my ideal layout would still have the main content in a single column. I would put all of the chrome horizontally through. For example no header before and footer afterwards, put everything in different columns. Maybe even throw some extra navigation on the screen.
You don’t need to use every pixel, just avoid putting things offscreen unnecessarily.
I don’t understand how this guy has an audience. I saw one video that was alright where he cleaned a water-cooling system. The rest were like, “look at all this garbage we bought on Aliexpress lol,” and I bounce after several seconds.
For people interested in tech edutainment he’s alright and has mass appeal. My favourite videos have been more of the interesting ones showing how fast his ridiculous fibre connections are in his house.
So much terrible click bait has meant I haven’t bothered clicking in a year or so though.
Same. I love any of their “infrastructure” type videos. One of my favorites is when their storage server almost kicked the bucket and they showed the unimaginably stressful recovery process.
I watch because its stupid. Its like why Call of Duty exists. Just dumb fun that doesn’t require much thought to enjoy. Sometimes you just need some good dumb fun and can’t be serious all the time.
He’s got a lot of charisma. And his videos frequently give that “people doing something they should have prepared more for but pushing through anyways” entertainment where you can laugh at how they put effort into creating an illusion of professionalism but left enough gaps to make it clear it was just an illusion and he’s in way over his head, but somehow still manages to keep it going.
It’s a weird spot where I like the guy and want to see him succeed but also don’t think he deserves that success and want to see him fail.
Though I don’t really spend much time watching hardware enthusiast videos in general, so I probably won’t see either of those unless it goes viral like his last shitshow did.
entertainment where you can laugh at how they put effort into creating an illusion of professionalism but left enough gaps to make it clear it was just an illusion and he’s in way over his head
I liked the time when he tried to use linux and ended up destroying his os by blindly following googled command line instructions
I would’ve done exactly the same, seeing how I am also a newbie at using Linux distros. Who would’ve thought trying to install Steam would result in your GUI being deleted.
He used to have some charisma lol. Also the early Linus Tech Tips content, like back when they were running it out of someone’s house, was usually pretty entertaining. Back then the content was much more silly and creative though, and much less corporatized.
I have 2 24" displays side by side. At some point I unified the desktops (or Spaces if you’re on Linux) to make it act “as if” it was a single ultra wide monitor. This was absolutely awful to use, especially during Google meetings where I had to share my screen.
Besides, I like being able to rotate 90° one of my screen because sometimes it’s just the best way to work.
This thing is stupid. Appealing maybe, but stupid.
if you use a tiling wm/compositor or extension, big screens aren’t so bad, because it will usually split first in the middle, basically giving you two screens, but with the option to also maximize over the whole area, if needed.
I’m pretty judgemental of people who use more than one screen. Do you not have hotkeys to jump between bookmarked parts of your buffers? Is momentarily splitting a screen between two programs so difficult? Does Alt-Tab simply not exist in your universe?
I’m an architect. It’s nice having the project I’m actively working on always active on one screen, with design sketches, marked up revisions, email with comments from client, renderer etc. active on the other. Sure it only saves a second not having to tab back and forth, but if you’re doing it non stop all day it makes a big difference. Also just less effort.
A glance to the side is much faster and easier than pressing physical buttons
You can see stuff with your peripheral vision. With alt-tab, you don’t see if anything is happening at all
Alt-tab is linear, screens are 2d
You can’t tile absolutely everything unless your screen is huge and has very high resolution, at which point it turns into rich people’s version of multi-monitor setup, since a bunch smaller screens are much cheaper than single big one
Alt-tab list changes constantly. But some apps are likely to be constantly there, you can throw them on separate screens and unclutter the main one by doing so
Alt-tab was my very last use-case because I literally have bindings to pull up my main programs.
As someone who has gone from tiling(i3), to floating (stump), to tiling again (i3/sway), and finally back to floating (awesome) - I can say floating wins in terms of predictability. You press a button to focus on your desired window and your entire desktop does not need to convulse to accommodate for it.
Floating window managers win on speed and predictability, and I’m wondering now if this is causing the rift in single/multi monitors in this discussion chain.
I didn’t really mean “tile” as in tiling WM, more like that if you’re this type of guy, then you could just just put everything you’d ever need somewhere on one screen, never maximize anything, and then nothing’s ever going to be out of sight.
My setup is mostly static, with 6 screens, so I rarely even switch windows on screen. I’ve got top-left for whatever is making sounds - music, movies, youtube, etc. Top-right is for the stock charts. Left is for comms - I’ve got all chats tiled up in there, but if I’m in the videocall I’ll fullscreen that, or, if I’m focusing, I put documentation and references there. Middle for IDE, right for the app I’m working on and a front-end debugger. There’s also bottom screen for a back-end debugger, a live database view and a small log tail. Top two screens are stationary that I only use at home, so I don’t need them when I’m out working. The rest are set up so that I don’t ever have anything important out of view. It’s exceptionally good when I’m debugging - I can see, live, absolutely everything that’s going with the app, from rendered page down to db data, click through steps and instantly see what happens where. It also saves me some time, as with one screen I would sometimes forget I was debugging after doing something different in IDE, and then wonder why tf is my app not responding. With debug always open this is never the case. I also set up win+WASD to jump between windows by direction, which in most cases means jumps between screens, so win+w - space would stop whatever is making a noise. When I’m off work, I usually surf or game on my middle screen, tops stay the same, so does the left, bottom switches to PC performance metrics, and right usually has something that controls the PC itself, like fan curves or sound mixer. Surely I could do with a single screen, and I actually went single-multiple-single-multiple before. The second cycle really taught me some window discipline. On the first go at multi-screen I got a short boost of productivity but then fell into a pit where I would have stuff all over the place, constantly switching and leaving apps forgotten on others. It wasn’t until after returning to single that I’ve realized exactly what I want out separated and consistent in one place.
floating (awesome)
Did you seriously set up awesome as a floating window manager? You monster! Jk, do whatever fits you
Ah I see what you mean by tiling. Still, such a setup feels… excessive, no? I can completely understand that you literally never need to pull up anything since it’s all just there, but I dunno (I’m reaching here) doesn’t your machine get hot from all the displays and forcing all screens to do constant screen updates?
It just seems unneccesary to me (like I said, I’m judgemental on this front). When you have to travel, you can’t take all that with you – so working on a laptop at the airport must be incredibly frustrating if you’re used to things just being there, no?
Did you seriously set up awesome as a floating window manager?
Haha, yes, the other layouts are wasted on me. Ideally a dwm desktop would suit me fine, but I enjoy the Lua extensibility.
Ah I see what you mean by tiling. Still, such a setup feels… excessive, no? I can completely understand that you literally never need to pull up anything since it’s all just there, but I dunno (I’m reaching here) doesn’t your machine get hot from all the displays and forcing all screens to do constant screen updates?
It is excessive yes, but I’m all about going above and beyond, sort of say. It doesn’t really get hot since it doesn’t update if there’s nothing to update - I’ve checked in the driver. Actually an error in said driver might have put an end to my windows journey on this machine, as some bug was causing all screens to not refresh unless there was any app doing a draw somewhere. It does use quite a bit of VRAM, though(~1.5 gigs) but that doesn’t matter when I’m working as I turn off the dGPU and the iGPU uses RAM which I have plenty. I used to just grab this machine and go to the nearest restaurant with poor internet(less distractions) and focus on work until the battery dies, and I’ve consistently got 2-2.5 hours off.
When you have to travel, you can’t take all that with you – so working on a laptop at the airport must be incredibly frustrating if you’re used to things just being there, no?
I do travel with it. It is a bit frustrating, yes, but as mentioned, the quad-screen setup is portable and I can pull it even in an airport given enough space. The problem is TSA, they used to not give a damn about laptops, but the last time I moved, they forced everyone to take out laptops and turn them on, at every one of the 4 airports I went through. But I had like 5 on me: My personal one w/extra screens, a corporate issued one as a spare, a tiny laptop that I used to carry in my pocket which saved me quite a few times, and also a colleague asked me to grab his laptop and iPad to pass off to his relatives. All this, along with a few HDD’s, was just enough to fit into a carry-on bag. But checkpoints were all something like:
Is that your stuff?
[On reflex already] Yes, and that thing in there is a vape, not a hand-gr…
Do you have any laptops in there?
Five
Five what?
Five laptops
Come here, put them out on this table and turn all of them on
😩😩😩 It’s going to take like 10 minutes to pack and unpack, and I’ve got a flight to catch
Don’t know, don’t care
5 minutes later
Alright, everything’s good. Why’d you need so many for, anyway?
I’m an IT specialist
Okay. But what’s this though?
It’s 4 hard drives
Take them out, show me
😩 Sure…
Okay, everything seems in order. Why’d you need so many for, though?
I’m an IT specialist
Ah, right… You’re free to go
I could’ve saved myself trouble and put all them into a checked baggage, but since I was moving through some totalitarian dictatorship states, I’d rather have all the data close to me rather than have it pulled out and searched without my consent, which they are likely to do given that they forced people to hand off unlocked phones for search before.
Well it sounds like your desktop is pretty scalable - no matter how many monitors - so that’s pretty good.
And hah yeah, it might be worth investing in a badge that reads “Hi, I’m an IT specialist, this all normal” and pinning it on your shirt before you enter customs
Just because you can work with one monitor doesn’t mean multiple monitors isn’t more comfortable though. You can have multiple windows open at once, at full size, and glance between them freely. No need for them to share the limited real estate of a single monitor.
I run Sway on my laptop because it lets me take full advantage of my single monitor, but on my multi monitor desktop setup I use a regular floating DE.
You may find the need for 3 different aspect ratios, just to be sure you’re doing the whole user interface thing right. Judge if you like but here I still need to have multiple workspaces and stacked windows, so clearly the extra retail space works. Or its obnoxious and I’m merely coping.
Also fuck games that still dont work with alt tab in this day and age
There are games like that? The only games that don’t like it I find are the old computer games that are already troublesome to run on a modern Windows machine
Oh dont even get me started on modded Minecraft, I’m really not sure what makes it worse for alt tabbing over just older versions, maybe its just selection bias, but it’s like one mod can decide that it no longer wants to go fullscreen, and I don’t think its fabric/forge
KSP was another one that was just kinda finicky, I think it got better with patches
It’s pure insanity to work like you suggested. Sure it can be done, I used to work on a Mac and had no monitors but it wastes time switching between displays.
I’ll work with 2-3 monitors.
If it two then I’ll have my IDE on one and if I’m working on UI then I have the application open on the other. That way I change some CSS, save and glance left to see how it looks now. If I’m not doing UI work and I’m working on the server then my other monitor is used for the spec document, SQL server management and just web browsing.
On a three monitor setup then the third one would be where I would keep my email client open with teams.
I am literally at a loss for words with your weird take.
Hey you do you bro I’m not about to tell you how to do your shit, but I think the consensus here is pretty clear.
Anyways if it works for you then no harm no foul, just seems counter to anybody I’ve ever interacted with that’s a developer. (That’s sounds like I’m saying you’re not, and I don’t mean it that way.).
It was a bit tongue in cheek I know. I have a very similar setup, but why being judgemental with such a simple thing? It seems like a waste of time and energy. You need those to tweak the setup instead.
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