Company I used to work at had a handful of Sun Ray's which all connected to either an 880 or 6800 in our datacenters if I remember correctly. I always thought they were really cool. I'd love to have something like this for my current setup as I have a large PC with tons of cords and crap all over the place at my desk. Something nice and small but connecting to hardware in the closet where all that mess is hidden would be nice.
With two CAT-6 cables, you can run HDMI and USB-2 (to a hub for keyboard/mouse) a fairly long distance with the right extenders:
(Note that one reason the HDMI costs $300 is that it does not compress the video; the $30 ones you can find have much longer range, but will use compression).
Both times this page helped out a lot with technical details! Nice to see it on here. A treasure trove of hacking starting points to repurpose quite slow, but still useful hardware (and saving it from a landfill).
There were a few gens of HP thin clients that always seemed to have their mass storage devices die, and end up on eBay for peanuts.
I picked up a handful of the 64-bit CPU ones and set them up to boot diskless with LibreELEC to act as Kodi stations for eg. media streaming and distributed video players on TVs on my network.
They boot quickly enough to not need to think about them too much, and it was easy to NFS mount my media library from my main servers.
Kodi controller apps from my phone and things like AirPlay/TuneBlade to cast arbitrary stuff to them has been a real quality of life improvement for my family.
I just wish getting "good" VDI at a small scale to leverage a small fleet (say, 3-4) of thin clients was easy.
VMware Horizon requires /massive/ amounts of resources on its own (something like 14-20 GB of RAM for the required services VMs alone), Citrix is a nightmare all its own, and I'm not sure how what else would work well out there.
I actually built this using my on-premises cloud platform in the past [0]. It was using Service Templates from OpenNebula, and would automatically scale the VMs based on number of users, setup the load balancer, acquire an TLS certificate, etc.
Once you have OpenNebula running (which is really easy), developing the re-usable VDI system took me about a week.
The RDP based ones are pretty straightforward to get going without a massive base infrastructure. Even with the intended way of running Windows Server as the host you can easily have 3-4 clients run on one meager server with no need for a managing VMs at all, unless you really want to do it that way.
On the Linux side I use persistent systemd-nspawn containers with bind mount access to the main storage. I suppose it's possible to do the same thing there, though I've never tried.
I knew a guy that was able to save the local school tens of thousands of euros by rebuilding the computer lab with a single beefy computer and many (40?) of these thin clients by using linux and LTSP.
Dear god. I’m halfway through the first video, of which I was _not_ going to watch all of due to the length, I was only going to watch a minute or two, cut to 11 minutes later and I’ve almost had to pause at how hard I am laughing. This is amazing and my life is better for knowing more about these hilarious commercials, the world building in them, and the impact of them that this video is represents. Pure gold. Thank you.
This is some of my favorite types of content on the interest. Not for profit, labor of love, sharing knowledge, evergreen.
On of my favorite things to do on the internet is to add context or explain how I solved a problem to older "content". As in an old SO question, an abandoned Github issue, or, until recently, an old reddit post. I know that only a few people will see what I wrote but I know that they will benefit greatly from it (as normally it's something that's taken me anywhere from 30min to 8+ hours to solve and I want to document it). I've typed the words "I hope this helps someone else" many times and it always leaves a smile on my face.
K-Meleon still runs well on older hardware (as well as Opera 12).
The best upgrade for my old x86 hardware seems to be Haiku OS. The browser situation is getting better all the time. As the overall system becomes more stable, even the full-featured non-native QT-based browsers will be more stable as well.
Other thoughts: nextcloud server running a single service (multiple nextcloud services will run like a dog on small hardware).
TinyTinyRSS gateway/server (your own google reader).
Text only usenet caching server via gmane.io and the other servers like sdf.org.
SSH / VPN gateway.
I have the first gen Apple TV and it makes for a great streaming server and networked stereo system.
What I'm missing in this (great) list: products from Shuttle [1]. Which is odd, because a Shuttle XPC seems to have been the author's very first thin client.
Some of the XPC slims are fanless, and the number of ports they come with is terrific.
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/sun/SunRay1/
https://www.spectra.com/sun/used-systems/193/sunfire-v890.ht...
http://www.anysystem.com/sunfire-6800-special-1.html