I am planning on adding a second monitor, 1680*1050 but turning it on its side to show more lines of code. I am concerned about subpixel rendering, especially since the reason of buying the monitor in the first place is to display text. Unfortunately, it is impractical to drag my desktop into every store and try to convince the salespeople to let me test different configurations on each monitor. How might I select a good monitor for this purpose considering that I won't be able to test it and that most monitors are meant to be shiny and show movies, not matte and show text.
I'm running Kubuntu with FOSS drivers, and using the onboard video of a recent Asus motherboard, if that matters.