Crippling flaws with the laptops people pretend to like:
Old thinkpads: shit battery life
New thinkpads: shit keyboards, shit upstream driver support
Pine64: flimsy case, bad performance, questionable freedom
System32: giant bulky things charged at twice the price of anything else
Librem: giant bulky things charged at three times the price of anything else
Dell XPS: absolutely godawful firmware, they should be strung up in the town square for it, crippling bugs in every inch of the machine
@sir Far too many laptops: 16:9 / 16:10 high-gloss displays.
Similarly: WXGA+ resolution (1440x900): most useless resolution evar.
Too fucking short for high-res text.
To fucking wide for portrait mode.
I'm leaning vaguely toward hybrid formats. A decent tablet, with a full shell, and a folio-type, full-keyboard, self-supporting case, might be an option. That featureset doesn't seem to exist.
@izaya There is that.
But in standard, laptop (or desk) use, 1440x900 is almost perfectly useless. Depending on pixel density / pattern, it's also not all that great in a vertical orientation (Roman/Latin glyphs tend to have more horizontal than vertical distinctive features, and where RGB patterns run horizontally rather than vertically, text gets muddied).
I do a *lot* of PDF, djvu, or epub reading. For that *either* a 1-up portrait *or* a 2-up landscape view is best.
@izaya A ~9-10" tablet in portrait usually works well for 1-up. A retina iMac is acceptable for 2-up viewing.
Actually, more than, as there's sufficient space to have a terminal window up on the side for Getting Real Work Done. Except that MacOS window management is a complete clusterfuck that I haet haet haet.
(Windowmaker FTFW.)
@mdhughes For terminals, generally, yes, though I'm reaching a point where I've got to start bumping font sizes up. This hurts more ways than one.
A key problem is that I'm *NOT* simply using terminals. When I'm reading PDFs on laptops, and older (non-retina) desktop systems, *I need the full display* for all but the most high-end (e.g., Retina iMac) displays.
Even for desktops, 1440x900 is depressingly common. For 2-up PDFs that's just not enough detail.
@mdhughes And since I'm generally reading *and* writing or researching, that means in almost all cases having another 1-3 screens, possibly more, visible:
- 2-up PDF
- Terminal w/ editor.
- Browser (text if possible, often not).
- Code
- Often further references (other PDFs, other writing, code references, etc.)
Yes, multi-tab / mutliplexed tools (screen/tmux) help, but only so much. Often I simply need a lot visible at once. Again, the iMac Retina (4096x2304) is WONDERFUL.
@mdhughes I'm working with a library of 10k+ docs of highly variable quality.
Massaging / mashing those into a uniformly readable format is ... part of the challenge I've set up for myself. Tools like pdf2text help, though only where the underlying text is actually accessible.
Otherwise it's OCR and a lot of hand-correction.
Again: this is my core requirement. A bunch of "nearly good enoughs" or "nice to haves" don't cut it. Most laptops completely suck.
Drew DeVault
Doc Edward Morbius ❌
Izzy's Old Account
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🌮 🚀 🌗