LG Has A Ryzen-Powered 38-Inch Thin Client Monitor With Ubuntu Linux Support

[grok]

Thin clients are fine, naive one will have no sound and no way to use USB drives (which might be a sought after feature!) and no 3D or OpenGL either but what works? everything else.
You can browse, use word processors, youtube in the small video size works, use terminals, run image editors.

You can mix them with thick clients, if the latter have /home mounted on NFS or are Windows machines with user accounts in Active Directory. The admin can be an asshole that locks everything out either way, or give you a normal desktop and a decent amount of software to work with.
So people can do 3D or multimedia on the same user sessions run from thick client..

Now if you mix local and remote on the same seat that's more complicated. I think the appeal would be to not bog down the application server with web browsers (running 20-30 or more browsers in the year 2018 must be something).
Also, "VDI" infrastructure sounds exactly like the kind of things made to benefit vendors and complicate things : if you're going to run one Windows 7 VM or one Windows 10 VM per user I don't see where you're saving resources much (but providing a new image may happen very quickly in the engine room, versus slowly transferring gigabytes to the user's seat)
It's more fun with linux, you can do like it's the nineties when organizations did it with big Unix machines , run 20 users on a single OS and there are no licensing costs (for the OS itself).

[starshipeleven]

Thin clients are fine, naive one will have no sound and no way to use USB drives (which might be a sought after feature!) and no 3D or OpenGL either but what works? everything else.
You can browse, use word processors, youtube in the small video size works, use terminals, run image editors.

You can mix them with thick clients, if the latter have /home mounted on NFS or are Windows machines with user accounts in Active Directory. The admin can be an asshole that locks everything out either way, or give you a normal desktop and a decent amount of software to work with.
So people can do 3D or multimedia on the same user sessions run from thick client..

This pretty much defies the point of thin client hardware. I mean the whole point of it is to be turnkey, you buy the hardware, install the server application, connect and it all works.

If you do all these shenanigans you could just as well do that with normal PCs that are managed as normal.

[Zan Lynx]

Thin clients are fine, naive one will have no sound and no way to use USB drives (which might be a sought after feature!) and no 3D or OpenGL either but what works? everything else.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure aka VDI works pretty well. You don't need clients to have 32 core CPUs, 128 GB RAM and an Nvidia Quadro when you can run that in your local server racks. With gigabit LAN even 4K screen displays are pretty responsive.

Many places have replaced their engineer's giant desktop CAD workstations with VDI. And on the plus side it's even portable with enough home network bandwidth. And the data stays in the office where (hopefully) it can be secured better against theft.

But anyway, OpenGL works perfectly well when all you have to do is transmit the video stream of the results.

[grok]

This pretty much defies the point of thin client hardware. I mean the whole point of it is to be turnkey, you buy the hardware, install the server application, connect and it all works.

If you do all these shenanigans you could just as well do that with normal PCs that are managed as normal.

You have to manage some things either way, unless you're really leaving everything to someone else e.g. renting desktop sessions on the cloud and have in the contract they must manage back ups and password resets etc.
Two broad options :
- one VM per user (this is VDI where you get one Windows 7 or Windows 10 copy running per user, maybe it's ok with a high end hypervisor that deduplicates RAM...)
this sounds like classical desktops except you can snapshot, rollback, provision VMs in a few instants I guess...
- one or more server with many users (like Windows NT/2000 with TSE, or Unix machines with serial terminals during the Reagan administration)
this is like a desktop OS, but if it blows up or you just reboot it in the middle of the day it will kill many desktop sessions.
You can do this with Ubuntu/Debian on a vanilla desktop PC, running LTSP.

A third option : LTSP has emphasized "hybrid clients", this is where you run your desktop on a local PC but it boots from the network, runs diskless, so all the data resides on the server anyway and is centralised (but has to transit to/from your desktop so it might make storage access slow, consume much network bandwith). That's cool too. Not quite a thin client at all but with free and open source software and no much complication you get sound, OpenGL, local USB storage and printers etc. which are somewhat high end and complicated features on thin clients.

Just local workstations but with user data on the servers : that's your Vista/7/8/10 desktop with "roaming profiles" stored on the Windows AD server, or linux + pam or kerberos etc. + openldap + network mounted home folder. Thick client with local hard drive and all but your data is centralized, hopefully (hopefully) secured and backed up.
Now, why I think this set up is similar to thin clients, VDI, hybrid client? If you're running VDI your user profiles / home directories are on some server anyway, you're likely running Windows AD or an ldap server (though there's such thing as Microsoft Azure AD too). If you're running a few big servers to run the desktop sessions (I think modern Windows calls that Remote Desktop Services) it should be the same, user profiles / home directories are stored on another machine and if the big server blows up you log to another one while IT fights the fire.

tl;dr I think the user accounts, user data, user passwords etc. should be separate from the machines that run the desktop sessions anyway. If not then you're not in a managed environment, rather a small office kind of set up with some laptops/desktops, though it would be perfectly possible to have a good desktop used by several users at once (like a multiseat desktop). This LG 38" all-in-one thing can still be used then at least

[grok]

But anyway, OpenGL works perfectly well when all you have to do is transmit the video stream of the results.

Must have gotten a ton easier indeed! These real-time video encoders on GPU are silly powerful, and they're a consumer feature even (streaming over the Internet to sites like Twitch, or streaming on the LAN using Steam or Nvidia's software). Multi-user seems reserved to Quadro and Fire Pro (or whichever they call it now) and you'll have Windows licenses on top (unless you run linux), or might need/want commercial grade software like VMWare, Citrix, Hyper-V etc.?

Dreaming of having just one decent PC at home, that runs games for several users (e.g. four or six players playing some game together), all with linux (or something Free like Xen if needed) and consumer hardware. Well I bet this would not be very productive but it would be fun (might be possible already with one GPU and one VM per user)