One developer has sought to find the most efficient monitor orientation for programming, but it's not horizontal or vertical. Aussie dev xssfox says the best monitor orientation is a diagonal tilt of about 22 degrees, and she's put her time and energy into proving it. Linux is the only operating system that supports diagonal monitor mode, though.
The more popular Windows and macOS platforms support myriad monitor setups. You can stick with the tried and true landscape orientation or spice things up with a vertical monitor. You can even mix and match different orientations. This has all been possible for years, and there's been little reason to add new kinds of monitor support. After all, who would want to use a square screen in any other orientation? Enter, xssfox.
According to the dev's breakdown, vertical and horizontal monitors are less than ideal for programmers. With horizontal, you can only see a limited number of lines. A vertical monitor solves that, but you're left with shorter lines, as well as poorly rendered websites with lots of padding. Rotating to 45 degrees might be tempting, but the actual ideal angle depends on your monitor's display ratio. For the 21:9 xssfox used, the perfect angle is 22 degrees. LG's weird 16:18 monitor would work best closer to 45 degrees.
Why 22 degrees? At that angle, you get the longest line length (stretching between opposite corners), and there's still more vertical space than horizontal. This approach does seem to assume your monitor is large enough that you can tile windows and make them large enough to be readable without cutting off anything important.
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This technique works by adding a manual transformation to the HDMI output, which is supported in Linux. However, it's pretty math-heavy. Luckily, xssfox has provided a handy javascript calculator on her site that will give you the necessary xrandr commands. Just take the resulting code and fire it off in the terminal to tilt your monitor output. This will require the xorg window manager—it does not currently work in wayland.
The "perfect" monitor proposal from xssfox has the feel of something that is technically true if perhaps a bit impractical. A diagonal monitor might get annoying to use, and if you're doing anything other than programming, it's probably not the best option. Still, Linux has support. Maybe 2024 will finally be the year of the Linux desktop, provided everyone decides diagonal monitors are cool. So, probably not.
