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

[johanb]

Though this is a pretty interesting product, I don't quite understand who the target demographic is. Being a curved display, it's obviously meant for a single-seat environment, so that eliminates a lot of potential uses (such as livingrooms or conference rooms). It's too large and probably too expensive for a family or office computer. It's too under-powered for an enthusiast. So, maybe it's good for a kiosk? Maybe a bedroom PC for watching Netflix? I can't really think of anything else.

My guess is for office workers where the workplace is rich enough to spend a bit extra on stylish computers but don't want an iMac.
Real estate offices and banks for example.

[microcode]

I have a XPS 13 with 16GB so you're misinformed

Maybe it's an issue with Canada? I remember the Developer Edition guy saying that all their models were now synchronized across regions, so I presumed what I am being shown in Canada is the same as you see in the U.S.? Dell's site really doesn't make it easy to tell.

Update: I took a look just now, and it seems they've added the 16GiB model to the site.
Further Update: Checked more closely, and it actually just seems that dell.com does not want to show me the Canadian site at all anymore.

[schmidtbag]

My guess is for office workers where the workplace is rich enough to spend a bit extra on stylish computers but don't want an iMac.
Real estate offices and banks for example.

But 38"? That's unwieldy for an office PC.

[grok]

It's ultra wide so a 38" ultra wide is much smaller than a 38" 16:9 for instance. Think of a 27" iMac with more room on the sides, taking width of a desk basically, or a replacement for dual monitor.

8GB, 128GB SSD? Sounds either underpowered or overpowered but Windows 10 is a bloated pig same or worse as Vista, so it's good to run a browser and Office etc. on default settings with default useless features and upgrades and virus scans hammering disk read and writes.
Picture editing, video editing should also run on this (by this point these might be less resource hungry than running an OS and browser)

This can be good to watch an industrial plant, etc.
It has more pixels than triple monitor 1280x1024, more than dual 1920x1080, a bit less than dual 2560x1440.

[Guest]

Add another 8 Gigs of RAM and a Ryzen 5 instead of 3 and I'll be throwing money at LG like crazy.

[wizard69]

My guess is for office workers where the workplace is rich enough to spend a bit extra on stylish computers but don't want an iMac.

Believe it or not most Macs are sold for the operating system.

Real estate offices and banks for example.

You guys are very narrowed minded when it comes to potential customers here. In one place i know othere are literally hundreds of PCs running windows that do nothing but data entry and production management. Then there is probably another hundred used for quality control. These are not areas for high powered workstations.

[schmidtbag]

It's ultra wide so a 38" ultra wide is much smaller than a 38" 16:9 for instance. Think of a 27" iMac with more room on the sides, taking width of a desk basically, or a replacement for dual monitor.

Good point - I wasn't really thinking about that.

8GB, 128GB SSD? Sounds either underpowered or overpowered but Windows 10 is a bloated pig same or worse as Vista, so it's good to run a browser and Office etc. on default settings with default useless features and upgrades and virus scans hammering disk read and writes.
Picture editing, video editing should also run on this (by this point these might be less resource hungry than running an OS and browser)

Considering it's meant to be a thin-client (so, it shouldn't have too many applications installed on it), I'm going with overpowered.

[andyprough]

8GB, 128GB SSD? Sounds either underpowered or overpowered but Windows 10 is a bloated pig same or worse as Vista, so it's good to run a browser and Office etc. on default settings with default useless features and upgrades and virus scans hammering disk read and writes.
Picture editing, video editing should also run on this (by this point these might be less resource hungry than running an OS and browser)

I ran a 128GB SSD for the past 4 years as my main laptop, ran like a champ. And yes, I edited videos without a problem.

Comparing Win10 to Vista is laughable. With those specs, Win10 will have no trouble whatsoever. I've run Win10 comfortably on machines with 1GB and 2GB of memory.

[grok]

Windows 10 seems usable after disabling "Windows Search" and "Superfetch". Maybe with an SSD (a 128 GB one is virtually guaranteed to be a decent one) you may survive these without noticing much. This is not unlike, er, a certain Windows version whose name shall not be mentioned once more and committed the exact same sin of running these and not caring about the user whatsoever. Sorry for conjuring the beast though.

Thin client or thick client? Yes surely a dedicated thin client would use a low end ARM chip or similar. This is a thick client, really. But when saying it's a thin client I bet they're positioning this in managed i.e. enterprise environments, where you might actually use it as a thin client as well. Have some really high end engineering, oil and gas, statistics etc. needs? You might put a workstation with 128 gigs or 512 gigs etc. RAM on every desk that needs it but this would be expensive and a bit cumbersome. Or you might be using servers already (let's throw the machine learning buzzword here) whether local or "cloud". For IT guys they have room to run RDP and X11 sessions etc. (troubleshooting, VM and stuff). Software devs? They need to run some crap like browser and IDE locally but should run heavy lifting (if needed) on servers.

This might help with office politics too. Standardize on one high end seat : the high ranking guy who only needs Powerpoint etc. won't complain of not having a dual Xeon and Quadro workstation like the underlings do. IT guys will quietly provide remote access to virtualized Quadro and Radeon GPUs etc. and/or big spec machines to the people who need it.
The specs are similar to a low end iMac or Macbook Pro, with maybe less CPU.
Well, if you need to run a web browser, it's well deserved. If you give me 3840x1600 and real mouse and keyboard I will fill the RAM with browser tabs probably. Great specs for a standalone too. Again, Apple has 8 gigs/128 gigs as the lowest options, not out of their kind heart but because of the software and web pages out there it's simply possible to run out of resources just doing simple things (they invented text editors or IM applications that use 500MB RAM remember)

[flubba86]

(wildly off topic)

Believe it or not most Macs are sold for the operating system.

I'm not a Mac owner, nor a Mac user. But I don't believe you. The MacOS operating system is free. It is a bonus that is thrown in when you buy their hardware. It is only their EULA/Licence that prevents you from installing your free MacOS on non-apple hardware. The vast majority of Mac owners I know purchase and use a Mac because of the "high quality hardware" and "stylish aesthetic", as well as the brand name. Most I talk to say they are "willing to put up with" and "just make do with" the OS, because they like the hardware so much. Why do you think there are so many people who purchase a Mac and immediately install Windows 10 on it, or Ubuntu?

A place I did some contract dev work for had an office fitted out with 5x 27" Macs with Cinema displays, they had OSX installed, but they all had VMware installed and immediately booted into a Windows 7 VM on startup. When I asked, "why not just buy Windows computers?" they said they prefer Mac hardware, but couldn't stand the thought of making any of their employees use OSX to try to get work done.