Several days into it – did not think it would last very long, but starting to like it and there are some advantages:
monitors don’t span as large of a horizontal distance.
a lot of content (like web pages, email, code, etc) is vertical, not horizontal. About the only thing that is horizontal is video, wide spreadsheets, and CAD.
scrolling (mouse wheels, etc) is naturally vertical, not horizontal
And some disadvantages:
moving mouse from outer screens to middle is a little clunky as you have to hit the middle screen
move apps in KDE with Meta-arrow is not quite as clean when moving apps from middle to side screens as there is always an extra step.
A 4K monitor is almost twice as wide as it is tall, so with 3 monitors you end up with 6 spaces for apps. Some apps I run in two spaces, but it is pretty similar in the end.
have you tried all 3 vertical ? I wonder if that would have some new findings, I have never had 3 monitor setup so don’t have much experiences to share.
No, I have not tried all 3 vertical yet – that would be an interesting experiment – especially for someone who does mostly coding. I still do some eCAD work, so I think it would be difficult to do that on a vertical monitor – not necessarily because it could not be done, but just that all the conventions for schematic sheet layout are built around landscape orientation. Additionally, most CAD programs have toolbars on the right/left parts of the screen.
One more observation – with all monitors horizontal, the outer two 1/2 screens on the far left and right were rarely actively used, just because they were so far away, so typically things like chat applications got parked there. With the vertical screens, this space seems more usable.
In the above setup, the KiCad schematic is stretched across the top half of both monitors and the Layout the bottom half of both. Was not sure how CAD would work on vertical monitors, but it is not bad at all. You just move the area you are working on to the right or left side. But what is really cool when you expand a PCB layout to cover both monitors:
I sent one of the AOC U2790VQ monitors back to be repaired under warranty, and they said it could not be repaired, so offered to send me a U27P2CA instead, which I accepted. The U27P2CA has USB-C, USB hub, etc. One thing I did not think about was the difficulty in color-matching different model monitors – I got them close, but not as close as the original three monitors were. Overall, I’m pleased. AOC was extremely easy to deal with on the warranty/RMA process. I paid shipping to get the broken monitor back which was expensive, but way less than a new monitor. In all, AOC seems like a quality organization and I will continue to buy AOC monitors where it makes sense – excellent value.
Still trying to decide if I can deal with eCAD applications spanning two monitors. For editing code, vertical monitors are definitely the way to go.
