The sorry state of laptop monitors

I mentioned previously that I prefer the old 4:3 monitor aspect ratio over the new "widescreen" 16:9, and apparently so do a lot of other heavy computer users, according to usesthis.com. I remember when I was first irked by the new ratio, I decided to read up on why the shift happened. I assumed I was going to learn that there was some kind of objective superiority behind the wider screens, based on some property of the human vision system or something. What I learned instead is that, according to Wikipedia, the new 16:9 ratio is basically something (very roughly) like an average of a number of old standard ratios from various different media and parts and of the world. So 16:9 is not actually better than 4:3 in any meaningful sense, it's just a permanent enshrinement of various historical accidents associated with television and cinema (not computers). Right.

Today I was getting really frustrated at work by my laptop's glossy monitor. It turns out that blue text on a black background, which is quite common in the default bash colourisation, is extremely hard to read on a glossy monitor when you're in a well lit office with a large window. It was driving me nuts, so I tried changing the terminal background colour to a deep grey, which helped somewhat by increasing the contrast between background and foreground. While I was fuming over having to do this, I thought to myself "I wonder why everyone moved from matte to glossy monitors anyway?". Once again, I am deeply disappointed. Wikipedia lists lists just one advantage of glossy displays:

In controlled environments, such as darkened rooms, or rooms where all light sources are diffused glossy displays create more saturated colors, deeper blacks, brighter whites, and are sharper than matte displays.

So basically the monitor on my most recent laptop (and the vast majority of all modern laptops) is noticeably less good at doing its job than the monitor on my other 7 year old laptop because it's been optimised for watching TV in a darkroom instead of, say, I don't know, operating a computer in an office. What a ridiculous state of affairs.