I too have a huge monitor. How anyone can use one without a tiling window manager is beyond me

A tiling window manager adds a bunch of keyboard shortcuts I can’t get used to. Not worth the mental load of having things change places on their own either.

It’s probably a me problem, but I’m going to open stuff and then leave it scattered around all day. It’s fine.

I don’t use more than a couple of virtual desktops either. Just one for current tasks and one for background apps.

I use a 40” 4K screen.

If I ever accidentally full screen a window, and it’s not in night mode, I am instantly blinded by a wall of mostly white empty background!

Do you have the brightness on your monitor set really high or something?

I frequently use macOS on a projector, it doesn't quite fill my wall floor to ceiling but it comes close. I don't use full screen often, but I do it occasionally as a focusing strategy, and it's fine.

Projectors are way easier on the eyes than monitors though.

You're shining a bright light on a wall, which you are looking at.

With a monitor you are shining a bright light at your face, while staring directly at the lightbulb!

Doesn't bouncing off the wall just effectively make the "backlight" dimmer? The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.

If you're using a monitor in the dark the way you use a projector, you should turn the backlight down. If you're using it in a well lit room, the brighter backlight should have less of an effect.

> The light reflected off the wall is hitting your face versus the light from the screen hitting your face. It's still light regardless.

It sounds to me you've never actually looked at a monitor display large swaths of white before, it's brighter than light hitting a wall for sure, even with the brightness down, extra so when the ambient lightning is dark too.

I've definitely seen large monitors that are unpleasantly bright in the dark, but I've also seen an overly bright projector that was similarly unpleasant. I genuinely don't understand why changing the backlight wouldn't fix everything. A projector's image isn't diffuse like a lightbulb, if it was you wouldn't see an image.

In principle, it's the same as staring at the moon Vs staring at the sun.

The fact that it's bright outside when the sun is up might help, but it's nowhere near enough to compensate!

I have three 27" screens (iMac in the center and two thunderbolt displays on each side) and I use most of my "daily driver" applications fullscreen (single monitor). So, things like Xcode, VSCode, web browsers, mail, Quicken, Spreadsheets and Word Processing, and so on. This gives me usually at most 3 things to do at once. Occasionally, for smaller apps, like calculator, messages and so on, I won't fullscreen them. But for my main workflows, it's fullscreen all the way.

My actual biggest pet peeve with this setup is the vast number of web sites that deliberately choose to limit their content to a tiny column centered horizontally in my browser, with 10cm of wasted whitespace on each side.

Without scaling, those rounded corners look not so rounded.

interesting! But, the default scaling makes them look bigger.

Computers were better with square corners anyway.