A friend of mine recently said his ultrawide monitor was as big an improvement to him as SSDs were ~5 years ago, which really got my attention.

In theory it makes sense. Instead of sitting multiple monitors side-by-side with the screen space divided by bezels, you combine the screen space into one monitor. Then you curve it so all the screen space is a more consistent distance from your face. It seems like an obvious way to improve things.

Possible problems I can think of:

-Fullscreen now occupies your entire workspace instead of being segmented to a single screen

-Your monitor's aspect ratio no longer matches the aspect ratio of most online videos (16:9), causing pillarboxing

-All your screen space is contiguous, so you can't let the limits of the screens manage your programs' window size for you anymore. You need to manage it manually, shaping and sizing the various windows to fit in the way you want them to. This could get annoying if you have to repeat this step often

-The ultrawide 3440x1440 has 400 fewer horizontal pixels than most dual monitor setups. I'm not sure, but this might be a limiting factor with certain combinations of IDE/terminal/vim/etc. Two-column ultrawide might not fit those as easily as 2x 1920x1080, and three-column ultrawide might be infeasible.

My current setup is a MBP on a stand connected to a 27" 16:9, so that's what I'm accustomed to. Currently considering this:

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-U3415W-UltraSharp-34-inch-Curved/dp/B00R420VAG/

But there are also popular offerings in this category from Samsung, LG, Acer, etc.

If you've made the switch, or tried to, I'd love to hear what you think about these new ultrawides. Specifically what impact it had on your productivity as a developer, how you make use of the available screen space, and how much difficulty you had getting used to it (as compared to a typical 2-monitor, or laptop stand + 1 monitor setup).