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Are thin clients always used in GNU/Linux environment?
I mean dumb X terminals connected to a shared PC in multiuser mode.
Anybody here doing this at home?
I find this clever to have only one big PC, up-to-date and just basic terminals.
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@adele yes at work.
Laptops would heat too much for low perf, they shouldn't contain sensitive data in case of loss; backups are more difficult to automate reliably...
So they are just vnc clients to powerful shared servers where we do most our work (simulations with costly licences to optimise)
@adele This was essentially how I learned to use real computers back in college. We had NCD X-terminals that were "dumb" and connected to the campus LAN, and from which we could connect to a myriad of compute services.
When I realized I could do the same from other buildings, I was dumbstruck and just amazed at how portable a consistent operating environment could be, as compared to the Windows and #MacOS (PowerPC) labs that -necessarily- rebuilt the systems after every logout. It was an amazing productivity boon, and I didn't even have to cary a floppy around with my files like so many other students. (oh, and I didn't have to wait in a queue for a PC!)
I suppose this is why I never found the emergence of the cloud, or ubiquitous Internet with self-hosting, all that amazing. It's really just a re-emergence of how things used to work [TM] before #Microsoft and #Apple screwed it up for everyone.
@ktneely and do you ever use this kind of system?
@adele well that was a long time ago. Now, my operating environment consists of a few systems running self-hosted software, plus one laptop and one desktop for direct interaction. I sync the config files using #Nextcloud to provide consistency of configuration but don't have true remote sessions like that anymore.