You assume that everyone has their monitors the way you do.
At work, I have two large 16:9 monitors rotated in portrait orientation (tall), so this would be useful to me.
Currently macOS only allows 90-degree rotation increments. This allows you to have your monitor in portrait orientation, or mounted from the ceiling or a shelf, hanging upside down so there's nothing taking up space on the desk in front of you.
I've been in a couple of events in the field where having arbitrary application window rotation would have been nice because there was no place flat to put the monitors.
I suspect this is to show off the compositing GUI: I recall this sort of things in screenshots of compiz/beryl when compositing window managers were new to Linux.
I've been in a couple of events in the field where having arbitrary application window rotation would have been nice because there was no place flat to put the monitors.
You don't want that.
With the boat pitching and rolling, so does the people on board looking at the instruments, so having the instrument tilt would be rather disorienting! as if sailing by itself isn't disorienting enough. ;)
Yes! I meant more, you have awkward spaces to fill and it may be convenient to mount a panel at some odd angle but still have it display things aligned with the floor.
> Currently macOS only allows 90-degree rotation increments.
Windows has supported landscape/portrait switching since forever, I think it was already there in windows XP almost two decades ago, if not it was in 7 for sure (and it's in 10 since I use it right now).
True though this may be, the quoted parent did not say "only macOS allows". They're asserting that on macOS, the only available options are in 90-degree increments.
> > Currently macOS only allows 90-degree rotation increments.
> Windows has supported landscape/portrait switching since forever, I think it was already there in windows XP almost two decades ago, if not it was in 7 for sure (and it's in 10 since I use it right now).
Allowing portrait is exactly what 90 degree rotation means.
Windows has supported landscape/portrait switching since forever, I think it was already there in windows XP almost two decades ago, if not it was in 7 for sure (and it's in 10 since I use it right now).
I wasn't trying to make a comparison to Windows, or start an OS war. I'm not sure why you even brought up Windows, since this discussion is about HelenOS.
But for what it's worth, Macs have supported portrait mode since 1989†, back when Microsoft was still pushing Windows 2.
I was an audio visual technician for years, and we had quite regularly requests to stick monitors at weird angles for visual effect. I could have definitely used this feature to do some cool looking stuff.
Every feature has a cost. Not just cost to develop, but cost to maintain. Every feature has a benefit- how useful is it, for how many users? If the cost outweighs the benefit, then it shouldn’t be allowed, for the sake of keeping the code maintainable and minimally fragile.
Portrait orientation for displays isn’t unheard of, but it’s very very uncommon amongst even technical users. I’m sure a bunch of people reading this have all sorts of anecdotal evidence otherwise- congrats, you’re special, and either have very specialized needs or want to cosplay as someone with very specialized needs (usually the latter).
But that’s portrait orientation. That’s on the cusp of not meeting the bar for being worthwhile to support, but in general most OSes err on the side of supporting it for certain pro users. Extend that it into arbitrary rotations and you’re dealing with a feature that is way, way more niche than supporting portrait mode, and way more complicated than people might think. All for a feature that has no justification other than, “if it can be done, why not? Might as well right?!?”
Now, maybe there are other benefits that I’m not aware of or taking into account, but surely it’s clear why not supporting arbitrary display orientations is at the very least an extremely rational choice from an engineering perspective.
I understand what you're getting at here, but it's also possible that this wasn't a directly pursued feature, and may have just naturally fallen out trivially from their display system's architecture & implementation as a by-product. If so, then the cost would be to exclude the capability explicitly.
> Every feature has a cost. Not just cost to develop, but cost to maintain.
A generic implementation that handles any orientation could just be the implementation with lower development and maintenance costs?
> surely it’s clear why not supporting arbitrary display orientations is at the very least an extremely rational choice from an engineering perspective.
That depends on the engineer. For some it might be easier to consider the special cases (landscape and portrait) first while others don't even want to be bothered with them until optimization time because a generic solution is the more straight forward approach.
