> Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we don't typically watch movies in the office.

That's on the right track, but going too far. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more reasonable.

The idea of using 16:9 screens for work needs to die in a fire.

IMO the closer the ratio gets to 1 the better but the only fact I have for this is 1280x1024 (5:4) being better than 1024x768 (4:3)

Meanwhile here I am, using an ultrawide 21:9 monitor and loving it as I can easily split it in two or three columns whenever I need. I don't understand why people like squarish monitors so much, the human FOV is not square.

Widescreen and especially ultrawide makes sense with bigger screens but is terrible on laptop-sizes screens, at least outside of media consumption.

How is the human FOV relevant? I just want to be able to fit as much vertical content into the visible area as possible. Because almost all documents we use are vertically organized.

y'all need to get yourself tiling window managers.

It's not ridiculous at all if you have to compare two documents side-by-side which is something I do 10 times a day while coding whether its documentation+code or doing a git diff

FWIW, I'm using a single ultra wide screen and never have any full screen windows, always two side by side. Most Linux DEs and even Windows support this out of the box, for macOS there's spectacle.

That said, working on a web project right now, we _are_ ensuring it looks good when maximised on ultra wide monitors, because we figure people might actually do that. But I'm with you there, for most web content it's ridiculous.

I found that 21:9 works very well for me for work (gaming too, mind you). Sheets can show many rows, I can compare things side by side, I can maximize a console with ridiculously long lines, and I can dock the dev tools in the browser to the side. It's a like two 5:4s, side by side, without the bezels.

I have a 16:9 screen in portrait orientation, excellent for reading/writing etc. One small annoyance of 1080 as horizontal resolution is that it is just slightly too thin for some web layouts.

Sat next to it is a 32" 2560x1440 unit (they have near identical pixel pitch, so I don't have to worry about oddities like differential scaling between screens) that most of the time is split into two halves or ⅔+⅓ (under windows, the FancyZones util in PowerToys is handy for this).

I liked the arrangement so much at home that I've replicated it at my own expense in the office.