Just my two cents: I've had occasional problems with games through steam on dual monitors. Things like losing mouse focus or changing resolution on the other monitor (though that hasn't happened for a long time).

Monitors are old Asus. I won't bother looking up the models as I'm sure they're outdated

I much prefer Multi-Monitor on vesa arms. Works better with the way I work, less hassle in games that don't like unusual aspect ratios.

10-year old 40" 4K in standard 16:9 ratio. way less neck swivel than two 24" side-by-side and way more screen real estate. 60 Hz max, runs off a $30 RX 570 4 GB. got no HDR, 100+ Hz, freesync, and other rich-people-stuff.

to me ultrawides are like what I have, only they chopped off like a third of the vertical resolution and they want more money for it.

I have an Alienware AW3423DWF and use it with Fedora KDE.

No problems here. Some games don't support ultrawide without mods but I haven't encountered any of these mods that don't work on Linux yet.

As for HDR, it should be ready for primetime once Proton 10 comes out with Wayland support. As of right now, you have to either run your game through gamescope or use Wine/Proton with Wayland support enabled, e.g. Proton-Tkg (Wine master).

It's a really good monitor by the way, still impresses me with its pure black on a regular basis, even in SDR.

I'm a sucker for window managers, so my preference is towards more displays, rather than bigger ones. It's mostly been dual horizontal setup, but I've rocked a triple vertical setup once that's been absolutely glorious for browser, terminal, and email client.

Gamingwise I would also suggest sticking to a multimonitor setup. It's easier to drive a smaller resolution.

OLED is a physical thing - OS and userspace doesn't care about it. HDR - not absolutely sure as I don't have a monitor to test, but I've definitely seen wlroots merge support for it.

I've tried both and I prefer Ultrawide for the following reasons:

• Less cables. Cable management is already hard enough as it is.
• No borders in between screens. Looks amazing when watching movies and for gaming.

My current monitor is a GIGABYTE G34WQC.

Ultra wide is better. If enough space an ultra wide and another 16:9 monitor. Games look so nice 21:9 and wider without the bezels of the older solution for ultra wide with multi monitors

Once you go UW, you never go back...

Just try it out haha

works fine on KDE, I use a 34" and wouldn't go back to a two monitor setup. Maybe two ultra-wides stacked vertically? But not 16:9.

I do use kwin with tiled windows, btw, with the new Krohnkite.

i have a 3 monitor setup for work machine and a 49" 32:9 ultrawide for my home machine. i like them both because of the things i do on them.

my home rig is regularly for gaming. a single, large, high ppi, high refresh rate, ultrawide monitor is amazing for a gaming-first setup. there is flexibility for off-work productivity here where i split 1/3x3, 2/3-1/3, or even 2/3-2/3 with 1/3 overlap.

my work rig is regularly for programming, communication (chat, video conference, email, ticket comments), time management, word processing & diffing, testing web clients....... i have to do a lot of things. the structured 3-monitored layout is great for me to keep everything in its place and flip between them frequently.

both multi-monitor and single-monitor setups have their benefits. all that matters is that you choose according to your preference and expected use-case.

I use a 34" UW as my main and a 24" as my secondary works great.

A multi monitor setup would be ideal. Get an OLED for gaming and an LCD for everything else. Text looks bad on OLED monitors because they don't support subpixel antialiasing. Panels and window borders will start to burn into OLEDs after several years, so it's best to save them for gaming and movies.

For an ultrawide monitor, you will definitely want a window manager that supports tiling. KDE supports basic tiling functions and there are plugins to make it better.

I have both lol, dual ultrawide setup. My main monitor is a 1440p 165hz ultrawide, and i have a 1080p 75hz ultrawide mounted above it that used to be my main monitor before i upgraded. A decent amount of games support ultrawide from my experience, but for some reason mostly japanese games often times don't support it. Usually you can find guides to edit the exe to enable ultrawide support, but i haven't had much luck with that myself. I don't have an oled display or use hdr though, but from my understanding you might be able to make it work in games by using gamescope. For other types of content hdr isn't really there yet, but the good news is that the required wayland protocol recently got merged, so it should be a matter of time before it will eventually be working. I usually always have atleast 2 windows open on my desktop next to each other, and ultrawide is really great for that because it gives each window more width to work with, so you have lots of space.

Not an ultrawide or multi-monitor user (single 4K 27” miniLED for me), but hdr support is so close to being perfect but not quite there yet. The support has finally been added to Wayland git and is coming in the next update iirc, but at the moment it relies on your window manager’s implementation (KDE’s works great) and doesn’t work for gaming without running gamescope (steam’s window manager) in a window. The only issue I think will remain with HDR after the next update is with apps that stubbornly use X instead of Wayland (steam is the one that kills me here), since X won’t ever support it so those apps will be SDR.

In terms of OLED support, they don’t need to be treated specially to work so any of them should work as normal - only thing to be aware of is that WOLED panels made by LG (used in asus monitors too) use an uncommon subpixel layout and you may have to set it manually or fiddle with your text rendering settings a little to see it perfectly. Samsung panels (like the ones Alienware uses) use the normal layout so no concerns if you go with that. Otherwise, screen dimming / turning off after a period of inactivity is a common feature and should be good enough for protecting from burn in. The only other OS-level feature I’ve seen related to OLEDs is shifting sustained bright pixels around to share the load - not sure if anyone’s made this on Linux, it sounds awful to use so I’ve never looked into it.

Someone else already mentioned old games not supporting ultrawide well, but worth adding if you go OLED you can just run it 16:9 and the letterboxing won’t be nearly as obnoxious as on a standard IPS/VA/TN/whatever monitor that would be blasting ugly blue/black light from the “disabled” areas.

My ultra wide monitor has worked perfectly from day one on Linux.

Currently I'm running an LG and Gnome 42ish, if I recall.

But Linux has had excellent support for ultra wide monitors since before I started being able to afford ultra wide monitors.

I use a 49" ultrawide. I find a window manger work very well with it.

5120x1440p

Edit: one downside is getting proper wallpapers for it that are not stretched or cut

Have personally found an ultra wide to work better as the secondary monitor. Can use it like 1.5 screens.

No issues on the various distros tried. The difficulty appears to be when having both hdmi and displayport connected instead of 1 or the other. (More than likely wrong just what I've experienced)

Can't speak to hdr but found the hassle of ultrawide compatibility on games to be not worth it. Most work out of the box but play a good bit of older games and those can have some hiccups.

YRMV

I did multi monitors for years and switched to a single 34" 3440*1440 ultrawide both at work and at home and I have never considered going back. I use a curved msi at home and a flat samsung at work. I would go larger size or higher resolution eventually but ultrawide is really nice for cad work so you still get a good work area without the sidebar eating into your view/modeling space. For normal use, I just do window snapping so I still get the function of two work areas.

I would kill for a 32:10 monitor

I have 2x32"@4k side by side at 100% scaling. No way I would switch to a single ultrawide as I would be losing screen size, so I would have to adjust the ratio to make it the same size and thus lose screen real estate.

I also prefer two monitors as I have different workspaces for each so I can switch just half the "screen" between different groups of apps. It would also be harder for my tiling WM, sway, to tile the large number of apps currently split over two workspaces without a lot more faffing.

Oh and switching apps to full screen would be less useful, I use that a lot as it's just two keys to flip it back and forth. I can keep reference on the other screen and the other app full screen.

I went for a 27" 1440p w/ 24", but that's because I had the 24" laying around.

I use an ultrawide at work, and it's fine, but I generally just use it like two monitors anyway, so for productivity I'd prefer two monitors so I'm not screwed when one dies. But I haven't done any gaming on that monitor, so I'm not sure how the extra real estate would feel for the games I play.

I'm considering replacing my 24" and am considering another 16:9, just bigger (30+") and 4k, though I'm worried my GPU will struggle (6650XT). We'll see.

I went for ultra big. 42' 4k OLED with no scaling is beautiful for gaming and practical for work.

Depends on your workload. If you watch movies and game, ultrawide. If you do streaming or web development, dual monitor is like a must. Oled and hdr are also supported, stable on kde and gnome, experimental on xfce. Dual monitor is supported by these, plus cinnamon, mate, lxqt, budgie, pantheon and many window managers. I myself use a 15" laptop bc im poor

What kind of setup do you rock?

Single-monitor, non-ultrawide.

My take is that as long as your monitor is positioned sufficiently-closely to fill a sufficient chunk of your visual arc, you don't need larger monitors set further back.

If you want to be able to have ready access to the stuff you want to see, it's a software problem, not a hardware problem. Instead of having a ton of displays constantly showing stuff, where you're only looking at a fraction of it, you want to make it easy to switch to the stuff you do want to see.

Like, I've seen people who have a monitor that they're writing code on displaying something like Visual Studio. It's got a tiny portal into code, and then the entire surrounding area is filled with widgets showing information about that code, lists of files, etc, that's mostly being ignored, where the user is only using a tiny portion of the display's space at once. I think that that's a sign of mis-designed software:

The part where I can clearly read text is a comparatively-narrow cone in front of my eyes. Rather than turning my head and eyes for productivity stuff, I'd rather have software aimed at rapidly letting me put what I want to see into that cone, and if it's multiple things, to switch among them.

Also, if you use a laptop at all on the go, you've got limited options as to a ton of monitor space, so you probably want a workflow that works with that unless you're willing to alter your workflow on the go.

When would I consider an ultrawide or many-monitor setup? Well, there are some types of games where filling peripheral vision is useful. People have had many-monitor flight sim sets for a long time.

If I were really into a particular genre of game that did that, I might consider it.

Problem is, that competes with VR headsets, and in general, I think that VR headsets compete pretty favorably for that use case in 2025. Some flight and racing sim fans have physical hardware, and VR doesn't permit for interaction with those controls:

But that's really the only drawback, and I think that the people who build rigs like that are a very small niche: they're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars and lots of configuration and setup time on controls for a single game.

And HMDs aren't, in my opinion, really suitable as a general-purpose monitor replacement in 2025, so can't just use VR headsets or whatever everywhere.

So my take is probably "single monitor positioned relatively-close to eyes". My monitor is on one of those monitor mount arms, floats over my keyboard. If one wants to fill one's peripheral vision for video games, probably use a VR headset for that.

oled monitor

I really like the contrast on these, was waiting a long time for these to come down in price. But one caveat which may-or-may not matter to you: OLED monitors in 2025 do not deal well with variable refresh rate (VRR, FreeSync, GSync, etc). When the refresh rate changes, it messes with the brightness momentarily. I am pretty sure that this is not a fundamental limitation, but as best as I can tell from reading, it's not an issue that's been eliminated by any monitor manufacturer. I'd guess that there are a limited number of OLED controllers out there, rather fewer than monitor manufacturers, so not that surprising that issues would be common across manufacturers)

What resolution do you play at? Ultrawide for gaming is really niche, I don't recommend it.