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[Update: WOW! Thanks for all the useful feedback! Plenty of information on the TV-as-a-monitor side of things (but feel free to add more!) Would very much appreciate it if folks could provide some input as to what has worked for them in using a laptop to drive a 4K display. I'd consider a used system. Would, ideally, like something that costs in the ~$300 range, but am resigned to the fact I may have to kick out more like ~$750. What graphics adapter do you have. Is it an integrated model (e.g. Intel HD 630) or discrete card? What model? What troubles, if any, have you had with getting proper drivers (windows OR Linux/Debian/BSD/etc.) Could you get the full 60 fps or were you limited to 30 fps? See below the fold for details on my current system and what my needs are compute-wise. --Bytram]
Summary: I need more screen space.
Which means I'll need a new (to me) laptop (portability++) which can support more pixels. I want a system that is Linux/BSD friendly. I don't have a whole lot of money to spend, so I'm hoping I can draw on the experience of my fellow Soylentils to help point me in the right direction. I'd like to avoid overspending, but I don't want to find that I've boxed myself into a corner for making an ignorant mistake.
I used to follow the bleeding edge of technology, but I've now firmly moved into the "I want it to just work" camp.
Current Display: I have a 24-inch, 1920x1200 computer monitor. The majority of my display is taken up my Internet Browser (Pale Moon) which generally has 50+ tabs. It is flush with the top of my screen and covers the entire display except for a ~2 inch margin on the sides and 3 inches on the bottom. That overlays my HexChat IRC (Internet Relay Chat) which runs across the bottom 1/3 of my screen. The remainder of the screen has corners of command windows poking out as well as various utilities like an analog clock, performance monitor, connection monitor, etc.
TV as Monitor: Over the past few months I've seen the prices for 4K (3840x2160) televisions plummet. I've got my eye on a TCL 43S517 43-Inch 4K Ultra HD Roku Smart LED TV (2018 Model) which Amazon has on sale for $349.00 with free shipping.
As I see it, I could get a display with better dot pitch than what I have now, and much more screen real estate, for relatively little money.
The vast majority of what I do is command line based, be it in a Windows (7 Pro X64) CMD.exe command window, or an occasional PuTTY session into Soylent's Servers. I do not do any video gaming. My only video needs are an occasional short clip from YouTube, or a DVD (I have neither cable TV nor do I stream video with Netflix or their ilk; no Blu-ray, either). Internet access is currently via a tethered LTE cell phone.
Current computer: Thanks to the generosity of a fellow Soylentil, my current system is a Dell Latitude E6400 with a Core 2 Duo P8700 (1.8-2.5 GHz) with 8GB RAM and a 500GB 7200-rpm WD Black disk drive. Video is handled by a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M.
New Laptop: My current is not going to cut it. So, I'm also on the lookout for a new (to me) laptop. I don't need much in the way of compute power. I figure pretty much any i3 or i5 should be more than enough for my computing needs. And, an Intel integrated graphics chip should be up to the task given a recent enough generation, but I'm not sure how current a model I'd need. I'm further confused by the different connection schemes and versions. I've found this page on Intel. What will I need? HDMI 1.4? Display Port 1.2? Other? Would I be able to run both a 4K monitor @ 60Hz and my existing 1920x1200 display?
With the increasing trade war rhetoric, I'm getting nervous there may be a price spike in the not too distant future. Further, I sense merchants are clearing out the current stock in anticipation of the holiday season, so I'm thinking the time is right for me to take the plunge and upgrade.
Conclusion: So, what have your experiences been using a 4K television as a computer monitor? What 'gotchas' have you run into? What things did you learn the hard way that you wish someone had told you about beforehand? What driver problems have you encountered? Did you have any issues with Linux/BSD drivers? What worked for you?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @12:36AM (6 children)
I bought into the 4k monitor idea about 3 or 4 years ago. I picked up a 28 inch monitor.
I almost instantly regretted not getting a larger screen. Why? Because you have to set everything especially large (fonts, window sizes) in order to actually read anything comfortably at that resolution. Basically I'd gained resolution and everything looked way better, but I didn't really gain any screen real estate over a 24 inch 1080p monitor.
If you decide on 4k, get about a 40 inch screen. If you decide on multiple monitors, get 1200p or 1440p screens.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday September 21 2018, @12:45AM (5 children)
Your experience with a 28-inch monitor confirms my suspicions. I already have a 24-inch monitor that I am running (maxed out) at 1920x1200; going to 28 inches wouldn't buy me what I am looking for. I want a larger 'desk', not more legible 'documents' on the desk.
I just checked and my cmd.exe windows are set to use an 8x12 pixel font. These are laid out as 222 characters per line and 55 rows in height. There's been many a time I wished they were wider and/or taller and even to have multiple ones of them displayed at once without overlapping. It is my hope that the physically larger size coupled with the higher resolution would allow me to accomplish that.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday September 21 2018, @04:00AM (4 children)
Just like the real thing, if you want a larger desk, then you need to increase the physical space it takes. And just like the real thing, there are two ways to do it: get one (desk or display) that's much larger, or get multiple and use them together. Getting a larger display tends to not be cost effective past a certain point, so what I'd suggest, if you can manage it, is to get three displays: two ~24" displays on the sides, with something even larger for the middle. Or maybe instead of the larger middle display, get a third one of similar size but rotate it 90° so you're viewing it in portrait, which is much better for certain use cases.
The problem with this sort of use is that, just like a real desk, what you have is never enough because, once you adjust to having it, you start wanting more. It quickly escalates from "I don't really need two, just a larger monitor would be fine" to "fuck, I wish I had room for a fifth display." I originally tried running two displays out of curiosity, and before long I was wishing I had a third because I could use just a bit more space. Three would be plenty, no way I'd want to go past that, I figured. Then I got a third, quickly filled them all, and started planning on getting a fourth. I was pretty happy with four, but after one got damaged I had to retire it, so I'm back at three and frequently frustrated that I'm missing the extra space. :/
That said, if you're set on getting a laptop you may not be able to manage this, since they tend to be pretty limited on external outputs. It's not entirely hopeless, though, because you can hack together a multi-display kludge with Synergy [wikipedia.org] and multiple X servers. The idea is you connect extra displays to your current desktop and use it as, basically, a thin client connected to the laptop. It just runs an X server that clients on the laptop connect to, with Synergy running on both servers so that you can get seamless mouse/keyboard input between them.
It sounds hacky but it works, and can be a good way to expand your workable space beyond the physical limits of a single system. You can even rig something similar with a shitty android tablet, which is the situation I was in when I got the idea to rig that sort of thing for myself. I needed some extra screen space while away from my PC, so I ran two X servers (one headless) on my shitty old laptop, with synergy running on both, and then used an Android vnc viewer to connect to the headless one. It effectively turned the tablet into a dumb 13" display, which was precisely what I needed at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @06:23AM
Assuming people still know how to write "desktop" GUIs and don't force some stupid tablet UI on you.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Friday September 21 2018, @01:07PM (1 child)
No argument on always wanting more display space! "If a little is great, and a lot is better, then way too much is just about right!” ― Mae West [goodreads.com]. =)
Hence my desk analogy. Why do we even entertain the idea that a 24-inch monitor, say, is an equivalent to having a 3-foot by 6-foot desk? More space allows more documents to be arranged, without overlap, for instant reference whilst still having space to work on writing the current work product. I won't be entirely happy until I have a monitor which has the same size and resolution as an office desk. Yes, I'll wait. =) In the meantime, I'm looking at a 43-inch 4K TV as an interim step to getting there.
There may be some confusion here; I do not have a desktop... only the one laptop. Was looking to maintain portability so was looking for another laptop to replace the current one.
But, the info on Synergy is *much* appreciated! Reminds me of the days when I had 3 separate rigs, each with a 20-inch 1600x1200 display that I used as dumb terminals to access one of the Sun servers where I worked, man years ago. (The left-hand box was for setting up test conditions; middle was for performing the actual steps of the test; and the right-hand box was for gathering and examining the outputs for logging and test pass/fail determination. Good Times!)
I had heard about "docking stations" or somesuch where one would feed a single Thunderbolt cable in, and have multiple monitor connections out. Ditto for some variants of USB 3.1 Gen 2 or USB 3.2 [wikipedia.org]. (I only know what I've seen in comments on various forums and what I've read over there in the Wiki.)
Anyway, thanks so much for the feedback, more IS better, and I'll definitely keep Synergy in mind. Thanks again!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Friday September 21 2018, @03:49PM
I think that idea started at a time when it was more common to actually display multiple programs simultaneously. Windows used to have a nice tiling feature that worked well for that exact sort of use case. Now, at a time when displays that are gigantic in comparison, multiple displays are common, and widescreen is perfect for displaying multiple things simultaneously, users primarily maximise one or two applications and swap between them instead of using the space like the desk it is supposed to emulate. Worse still, "UX designers" as a group seem hell-bent on claiming as much screen space as possible for themselves, constantly adding superfluous whitespace and larger text to fill the void without even considering the idea that some of us might want to see two or more applications simultaneously.
The desire to more efficiently use desk space is what led me to tiling window managers. Specifically static ones like notion [github.io] and herbstluftwm [herbstluftwm.org], where I can still control window sizes.
That's basically what I do with 3-4 displays. They almost completely fill my desk, giving me the closest thing possible to a full desk worth of virtual space. I wouldn't mind having a larger one in the middle, but I generally prefer having 3 over one huge one because I can tilt the side ones to guarantee they're clearly viewable at the edges.
Yeah, I didn't realise you had a laptop currently when I wrote the comment. The "current computer" section didn't mention being a laptop anywhere, and since you wrote it that way and then "new laptop" in the next section, I mistakenly assumed you wanted to transition from a desktop to something more mobile. That makes the idea of using the old system to drive a lot of displays less feasible, unfortunately. However, you could probably build a thin client-esque system pretty cheaply and put an old GPU with 3+ outputs into it. Some kind of low-power CPU and a small motherboard, the tiniest SSD or HD you can fit a bare-bones Linux distro with Xorg onto, and just enough GPU to drive the displays. Make its entire job be to display stuff from the laptop when you're at home.
Yeah it's realy useful. Synergy is basically a staple for multi-system work, though interacting with Windows sucks now because they went closed-source on it and you have to dig up an old version if you want to interact with the version in Linux distros. :/ Though if you don't care about getting Windows in the mix, there's also xdmx [sourceforge.net]. It's a proxy X server that multiple X servers attach to, presenting them all as a single unified display. Haven't had a chance to use it but it's one of those things I keep in my pocket in case I run into a need.
Sort of unrelated, but also worth mentioning is xpra [xpra.org]. It's basically screen for X11: it's an X server that isn't attached to a display, and forwards its windows to other clients that attach to it similar to how screen and tmux operate.
I completely forgot about Thunderbolt. It's technically an open standard anybody can use but it's still managed to be stupidly tied up by Intel in a way that makes it unavailable on AMD boards currently. I avoid Intel when possible because of a combination of 1) distaste for their business practices; 2) annoyance at their style of extreme market fragmentation (locking features behind minor SKU variations to jack up prices), which tends to lock me out of niche features I want to use; 3) the poor chip cooling issues thanks to their use of TIM on chips instead of solder; and 4) priced way too high for what they offer generally.
Anyway, it's an idea if you can make it work. No idea what the status of it is for general use, I've only ever really heard of people doing multi-monitor like that with macOS, where I believe it's basically the only option for their laptops.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday September 22 2018, @03:28AM
Junk fills the space allotted !!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.