Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.
I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.
I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.
Citrix does well in those situations. A standard virtual machine image set up for standard users and then seperate images for those that need other apps running off seperate hardware with dedicated GPUs. None of the data needs to pull to the device you are on, and no matter what machine you walk up to, even remotely at home you can access it without even needing a VPN but rather set it up using 2 factor on the login site where only single factor is needed when onsite. So no software is needed on any of the clients you log in from. And the “computer” you are signed into is located on the same network as where you use network drives so it works better than a VPN at accessing the data.
Someone hops on your machine when you went to lunch, hop on another and have it bring the same desktop you were using up, drive home, same desktop. If set up right it’s nice, if not… There is always struggles for people
Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.
I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.
I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.
Citrix does well in those situations. A standard virtual machine image set up for standard users and then seperate images for those that need other apps running off seperate hardware with dedicated GPUs. None of the data needs to pull to the device you are on, and no matter what machine you walk up to, even remotely at home you can access it without even needing a VPN but rather set it up using 2 factor on the login site where only single factor is needed when onsite. So no software is needed on any of the clients you log in from. And the “computer” you are signed into is located on the same network as where you use network drives so it works better than a VPN at accessing the data.
Someone hops on your machine when you went to lunch, hop on another and have it bring the same desktop you were using up, drive home, same desktop. If set up right it’s nice, if not… There is always struggles for people