Asklemmy

It sounds like people in your workspace haven’t discovered opening multiple windows side by side.

I’ve found people in the windows world often make everything full screen all the time- such a waste. You have a 40” 6k display and you open a single giant word doc.

You could have 3 or more documents open side by side- or a webpage for reference, a notepad, and your work or 1000 other combinations.

I do development work so my workflow is extremely text heavy, but it’s rare that I don’t have 4+ windows open simultaneously per display. I also use an old dell monitor I had laying around rotated 90 degrees as others mentioned for log monitoring or chat threads.

I think people just need to get more creative using their space- it’s not the monitor’s fault if you don’t fill it with stuff.

Modern squarish (16:18) monitors do exist, a friend has one and swears by it. For example, this one isn't even that expensive given the size, resolution and that it's bundled with what looks like an excellent monitor arm.

Personally I'm more in the "two windows side by side on a big ass 16:9" camp.

The market is to optimize for max human eyesight, which is a horizontal aspect ratio. For edge cases, a monitor can be converted to a vertical aspect ratio easily.

There really isn't a large market to go square. If anything, monitors have gotten wider over time.

I imagine it has to do with binocular vision. If each eye sees roughly a circle, overlapping roughly makes a landscape rectangle. So perhaps that aspect ratio and orientation just "feels" better?

You turn your secondary monitor 90 degrees and rotate the screen in display settings. This is how I worked on long list items.

It’s easier on your neck to look side to side than it is up and down. So to get more screen real estate it makes more sense to go horizontal. Anecdotally, I constantly have two documents or a document and a web page open next to each other on one monitor. The landscape framing works really well for that.

I personally think portrait monitors, like a standard modern smartphone, would resolve most of these problems.

Also for programming, most IDEs make good use of the horizontal space and expect a roughly 16:9 screen where the IDE takes up most of the space on that screen. Not that you can't just minimise the side panels but still, it's a helpful feature of the software.

As for why portrait isn't the default, I dunno, but if you start using a portrait monitor at work you'll probably get some coworkers following suit if it's such an improvement.