presbyopia

At the age of 0x2A, I begin to discover that HD and beyond monitors just suck for anything other than watching movies. I pull out a tape measure and calculate DPI but it seems that the correct value just makes the screen look like a billboard.... Then I try adjusting font sizes because everything is way too small, or displayed by default with a super-low-contrast solarized (sc. "washed out") color scheme.

Before you could easily customize your colors (Win 95 to XP, Mac OS up to Sierra, Gnome/KDE/whateverWM/DE) I remember everything always defaulting to horrible BRIGHT as hell UI colors.
At least, finally it is becoming trivial to have a dark theme in OS and browser....

In the end, regardless of distro/proprietary OS, I find things ugly but usable. I wonder when letter/A4 paper will be replaced by some crappy cinema aspect ratio paper. Panned and scanned movies were bad, but looking at documents and terminals in cinemascope sucks too. Maybe it is just stupid to use the same device to write code/text and watch movies.

Now whenever I see a square(-ish) LCD monitor in a junk shop, I buy it. (Westinghouse LCM-22 remains my favorite after all these years. I've even replaced bad capacitors in them.) Everything just looks better at 1680x1050. Even 1366x768 doesn't look too bad, right out of the second-hand box.