My 4K experience in Linux hasn’t been very good, so I’m just going to go with dual 1080p monitors. Right now I have a decent 27" 4K main and a cheapy 24" 1080p secondary, and scaling has just been a pain. Plus I don’t really care about 4K gaming in general.
So I’m debating…
Do I get one 27" 144Hz IPS monitor for now and save up for another one later?
Do I get two 24" 74Hz TN monitors for the same price and not worry about it?
I’d rather have one good monitor than 2 crappy ones but I’m a little spoiled on the high refresh side of things and this has lead to me not being able to comprehend the idea of going back.
Tread lightly here. You just might find it too hard to have a crappy monitor in the future and therefore your wallet will suffer.
Let me ask a question…
Is it just gaming you are into, or your goal is to do other work? If I have to choose for myself, I would use 2 monitors. I simply cannot work with only one monitor once I have gotten used to using 2 monitors.
If you don’t really care about anything and you just want to game, one monitor is perfectly fine. Get the 144Hz monitor. But for me there is no going back to single monitor.
go for the good one, you have 2 other monitors you can use for productivity, and long term, how long will you use the product until you want to upgrade? the bigger, higher refresh rate, 1440p monitor will get more use out of it, and you can only have so many monitors on your desk.
Maybe I could just find a really nice 24" 1080p monitor instead of 27".
Ya true. Plus I’m on Linux now, so unless I went single monitor I couldn’t use it anyways
Even G-Sync on my gaming laptop isn’t that noticeable. It looks a little smoother, but also less responsive.
Gaming, photo editing, coding.
Ya definitely. I wouldn’t go single monitor. I’d just keep my cheap one as a secondary until I got another good one. It’s just in Linux I have to scale down my 27" 4K monitor because everything on the screen is way too small. So I set it to 150% in GNOME and it looks good and matches up pretty well with my 24" 1080p monitor, but it resets every time I shut down the computer.
Something you should know too about linux and refresh rates. None of the current DEs support mixed refresh rates at all really. If you get 144hz working in gnome, its just gonna tear on the other lower refresh monitors or gimp your 144hz display to 60 anyway.
I never had a good experience with high refresh and gnome.
Ya I’m not really a huge fan. But some DE’s just don’t work well on 4K. GNOME looks fine with scaling. KDE looks alright too, except if I remember correctly it wouldn’t do separate monitors, so then the 1080p monitor would look like crap.
Ah… shitty.
I mean honestly I don’t care about tearing on my secondary while I’m gaming. It’s basically just there to run YouTubes and Telegram while I’m playing, but I’m not actively watching it. But if it’s gonna lower the main to 60Hz then fuck that.
Maybe I should have qualified this clearer. This is a problem in the DE only. Games will still run at 144 just fine so long as they’re not windowed or anything.
I havent tried this but my current understanding is if you run windowed then the compositor is in charge of displaying the game and therefore you’ll be limited.
It would probably be better for you to match refresh and resolution if your goal is to use linux with it. I keep windows on my gaming desktop because of this limitation.
Ya that’s the goal. I don’t think I’ll get another 4k, just because the scaling thing. Even with 4k on both screens, some stuff just doesn’t scale well.
I feel like 1440p would be the perfect resolution. Less stretched than 4k, but not as smushed as 1080p. So that’s what I’m going to go with. That way I don’t even have to touch scaling settings, and I can just live with the potential refresh rate issues until I can afford another matching monitor.
