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

[AndyChow]

A thin-client monitor? Hmm... That is something new and it really piqued my interest. So it's targeted for a business market... Hmm... Anyone using a thin-client monitor at home?

Not at home, but on the road, I use my chromebook as a thin-client. Just SSH into whatever I need to, 12 hours battery life, and no moving parts, fans, etc, so it handles the travel abuse.

I have used a nettop as a thin client before, at home.

The only thing I find very odd about this is the ultrawide screen. Most business work is better done on a "squarish" screen. an ultrawide screen makes no sense.

Also, not to rib them, but LG is definitely not thought of as a business solution provider. I've never had a corporate pc that wasn't a Lenovo, HP, or... that's about it. I've seen marketing people with macs, and heard of people having Dells, but that's it. (and obviously a lot of Bloomberg terminals, whatever they use as OEM). Business supply is a tough business to get into. Mostly because businesses want predictable scaling models and statistically-matched responses to expansion.

[AndyChow]

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.

Banks are the most conservative customers ever. They only use extremely proven and stable equipment. IBM, Lenovo, and Bloomberg. Go to your bank, and you'll see most screens are 4:3 ratio, and run the most ugly, slow and globally stable software. Like Citrix, Oracle, and PeopleSoft. And for some reason the only modern thing they are adopting is Salesforce, which is unusually "agile" for that industry.

[AndyChow]

(wildly off topic)

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.

MacOS is not free. It's cheap, but not free. It does cost $20-40. https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/produc...6-snow-leopard

That said, it's free with the hardware, and updates/upgrades are free. I bought mac hardware in the past, and yes, it was completely for the nice hardware and aesthetics. It's the only "PC" company where I bought their magic mouse for $100, and didn't feel ripped off. The packaging, hardware, and details of quality were awesome. I bought a microsoft mouse recently for $25, and feel ripped off. It feels so cheap to the hand, and the packaging was cheap plastic thing that I had to use scissors to cut around.

But you know, I just gave my mac computer, keyboard and mouse to a friend. It seems cool, but everything is very slow. Also, the software store is a mega scam. I look for a free software, like iMovie, I get tons of results, all from $4.99 to $49.99, all scams. You have to filter "only show software from Apple", and then you see the free one. The others are videos, tutorials, or templates clearly designed to confuse and scam unsophisticated users.

The only reason I had mac hardware was to develop software for the iphone. But really it became such a pain, we just decided to stop supporting it. Their API breaks all the time, and when things look great, they look great, but when they don't, it looks horrible. That said, they did provide unbelievably great documentation to their APIs, and if you read it, you understood everything. But I have no interest in reading the new 180+ page documentation every 6 months, and having to relearn everything all over again.

And doing anything, is so slow! You constantly see that spinning pointer whenever you open anything at all. Open the browser? Wait 10 seconds. Open the email client? Wait 10 seconds. Open Keynotes? Wait 10 seconds. We are in 2018, I get mad if I have to wait 1.5 seconds for anything.

[enihcam]

This is not a TV.

Why this is not a TV?

[PyroDevil]

Why this is not a TV?

Right you are. Since you could make a tv out of anything that runs a browser or some streaming client.

I think what starshipeleven meant was that this is not designed to be a tv. The curvature might be to strong or just the size to small for this resolution to look at it from a greater distance or with some company.

[xiando]

Besides, "thin clients" have always been a scam so I'm not even surprised. Supposed to lower costs and make management easier, plant flowers and save kittens.

Perhaps they are but more often than not the corporate support situations I've worked with involved a large amount of people using a computer to run one specific application and this application is frequently running on a remote server. A lot of times it's something ancient that's text-based. If it's more advanced than that then it's something built specifically for Windows XP or similar ancient software running on either the Windows version it was made for or, rarely, a VM. I totally see "thin clients" as a viable solution for a whole lot of corporate use-cases. A Ryzen 3 is totally overkill for something that would run just fine on a Pentium 100 from 20 years ago.

[starshipeleven]

Why this is not a TV?

tl;dr The optimal viewing distance is around 1 meter from the screen or less, TVs are usually designed to be viewed from farther, 2 or even 5 meters. Which is why they still exist at all and aren't all just called "monitors" or "screens".

This is a curved PC monitor screen so it will look like crap if you are outside of the focus of the curve (which is going to be within 1 meter from it, because it was designed as a PC monitor, curved TVs have a different curvature so the focus point is farther than that).

Because of its resolution and aspect ratio, a 21:9 is a PC monitor resolution designed to allow 4k resolutions be viewed from around 1 meter of distance without being very cumbersome, a 4k TV would be a 16:9 as if you are looking at the screen from more than 1 meter you can see the whole higher screen without moving up your head.

Also because 21:9 is a weird aspect ratio for media which is either 4:3 or 16:9, you're going to waste screen space. (yes there are SOME media that offer 21:9 aspect ratio, but most don't)

This is a monitor with a mini-PC attached, nothing stops you from using any monitor as a TV, (everything is a dildo if you're brave enough) but it's going to be very inferior to similarly priced TVs.

[Adarion]

LG? Linux?
Call me old-schooled but wow, a nasty place must've frozen over. I still remember the days of LG CD drives / burners when iirc. Mandrake used some standard ATAPI command like flush_buffer to check if it is a burner (that has a write cache than can be flushed) or a normal CDR. Well, didn't go well with the LGs. Instead they flushed their firmware(!) and bricked. LG then just said "we don't test our devices with Linux" or something like that...
That kept me from buying anything LG for the last ... many years.
But good to see that LG is seeing the light of day and offering an officially Linux compatible device (and fancy Zen stuff in it).

Well, this thing looks impressive but I wonder if one could really see this as a thin client. Not everything that has a computing box attached at the back of a monitor should be labeled thin client. This could also work as some HTPC, some device to display public information and whatnot.

[starshipeleven]

Perhaps they are but more often than not the corporate support situations I've worked with involved a large amount of people using a computer to run one specific application and this application is frequently running on a remote server. A lot of times it's something ancient that's text-based. If it's more advanced than that then it's something built specifically for Windows XP or similar ancient software running on either the Windows version it was made for or, rarely, a VM. I totally see "thin clients" as a viable solution for a whole lot of corporate use-cases.

Thin clients are ok for single-purpose systems like signage, PoS, control panels for stuff or dumb data entry terminals, but even in an office you'd be so much better with a PC because the user has to be able to deal with something out of the ordinary every now and then.

The sales blurbs for thin clients usually sell to the managers the idea that they can replace EVERY computer in the friggin company with these single-purpose turds, that don't cost less than a normal office PC but are crippled software-side to run 2-3 applications (that suck and will never be updated).

And when the user inevitably finds a document or image or tool or whatever that he cannot use you're fucked. The amount of fapping with network infrastructure required to setting up a whole company with thin clients is significant, and at the end you end up with an inferior, locked-down turd that also vendor-locks you to Cytrix or whatever is the seller for support contracts.

If they go one step further they reach the point where they even develop (or buy) company-grade applications that run only in the thin client's walled garden, vendor-locking cubed.

In all this pretty much everyone gets shafted, the operators, the support people, the network/system admins.

Chromeboxes (mini PCs running ChromeOS) deserve an honourable mention in all this, as they are the only type of thin clients that actually don't stink.

A Ryzen 3 is totally overkill for something that would run just fine on a Pentium 100 from 20 years ago.

You can't run any browser (modern webapplications are straight out of the window), nor modern custom thin-client-specific applications in that.

A Ryzen 3 is probably oversized a bit, but a Pentium 100 is not anywhere near what other modern thin clients use. Even the shitty ones offering a remote desktop to somewhere else are using some ARM processor or shitty relatively modern Intel Atoms that would run circles around such ancient hardware.

[starshipeleven]

Right you are. Since you could make a tv out of anything that runs a browser or some streaming client.

I would have said "watch the TV out of" instead.