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posted by chromas on Friday September 21 2018, @03:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the moar-pixels! dept.

[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?


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:13AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:13AM (#737964)

    First off, in the original story I mentioned that I have a 1920x1200 monitor.

    Correct, you did. Relevance? The monitor I'm using for the 11.5" browser window is also 1920x1200.

    Second, I have frequently needed [soylentnews.org] to view a story submission and the original source article at the same time. ... I use TileView to view the source and the submission in side-by-side tiles within a single browser window...

    The above is information not in evidence from the contents of the original submission. Therefore this is akin to a goal-post move.

    Further, This likely indicates that Soylent's shitty CSS plus TileView's likely shittier CSS simply does not auto-adjust itself to fit the available space well. Soylent's CSS already wastes about 2.5" of left edge space in the browser for crap that is unrelated to the story at hand. Add a plugin to display things side-by-side with likely just as shitty a waste of space in its CSS and you've got a recipe for disaster.

    Case in point re. the shitty Soylent CSS. The story submission entry box begins not sized to fit the browser window, but sized at about a fixed 20 inches wide, with overflow set to clip (so no scroll bar) so one has to maximize to find the resize handle to drag the text area back to a size that fits the actual browser window size.

    So I'd submit that better CSS that better adapts to the available space might be a more productive use of your funds, because that would benefit everyone, not just you.

    And then don't get me started about Soylent's absolute shitty CSS when on Android Firefox. The damn site tries to stuff a desktop width layout into a phone sized screen, resulting in 1point font size until one two finger zooms, at which point reading the article means lots of horizontal swish scrolling.

  • (Score: 2) by martyb on Friday September 21 2018, @01:22PM (1 child)

    by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 21 2018, @01:22PM (#738089) Journal

    Second, I have frequently needed [soylentnews.org] to view a story submission and the original source article at the same time. ... I use TileView to view the source and the submission in side-by-side tiles within a single browser window...

    The above is information not in evidence from the contents of the original submission. Therefore this is akin to a goal-post move.

    Disagree. I simply stated, originally, that my browser took up about 75% of my screen. Then came the claim that I did not need all that width -- that I would be fine with just 11.5 inches. I disagreed and explained why, for me, it made sense that I used such a large browser window. IOW, pointing out that what works for you is not generally applicable to everyone, specifically myself. You made the assumption as to what my needs were, and I clarified that was not the case.

    And, as for the rant about "shitty CSS": (1) We don't have anyone on staff who is gifted in that realm... wanna step up and help out the rest of the community? (2) There are other use cases where having a wide browser window is useful for me, besides just SoylentNews. I need not, and will not, go into ALL of the circumstances. I may be ignorant about some of the minutia of current system specifications, but I've been at this a while (first computer programming I did was using a genuine Teletype with 110-baud acoustical coupler dial-up access to a DEC PDP-8. I've since tested Operating Systems, Compilers, Data Bases, and a plethora of customer-facing applications and web sites.) So take the snark somewhere else.

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday September 22 2018, @03:55AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Saturday September 22 2018, @03:55AM (#738475) Homepage

      And then there's the whole rest of the web... I have browser window set at 1150px wide, because that's the minimum to avoid misbehavior (sidescrolling or partly invisible) among "sites I use all the time". I'd prefer a window about 800px wide, but then I'd spend half the day resizing it.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.