Robert Pogson

Over the years I have found the acceptance of GNU/Linux thin clients good because of the increased access (more seats) and increased performance (responsiveness of servers v thick clients). Still, there are many who have not seen this and question the acceptance of thin clients for education or business. I found an article reporting on the results of three tests of acceptance of thin clients in three different scenarios in an academic environment. The third trial, which I consider definitive, inserted thin clients in amongst PCs and provided identical logins and desktops from M$’s terminal services. Thus, the users were blind to the use of a thin client. The machines looked like PCs for the most part and booted PXE etc. and used RDP. The result was 92% acceptance and only the performance with USB was noticeably slower with the thin clients. USB2.0 v 100 megabits/s may, indeed, be noticeable but there are many environments where USB is not an issue at all. USB 2 & 3 are faster than even gigabit/s networking. This would mostly be a consideration for large documents and files rather than smaller, more commonly encountered documents.

Compare that acceptance with the increased performance from a well-endowed GNU/Linux terminal server and there are many good reasons to use thin clients in education. The study noted that users preferred the boot-up of the thin clients because it was faster. Other advantages possible are the ability to leave a session and come back to it later even from another station. This is wonderful for students who have to move around on schedule and may find themselves closer to a different machine when next they are free to use a computer.

For the most part, I have replaced old thick PCs with new servers and thin clients. There is no clinging to the old ways from that perspective. It is just unreasonable to assume any non-profit organization has the ability to replace old PCs with the state-of-the-art new PC periodically to stay up to speed while they can upgrade a few servers for much lower cost. My cost of server per user is about $25 these days, not the $100-$500 cost of some PCs. For that I get the advantage of huge RAID, RAM, multiple cores and gigabit/s networking. I will give up sluggish USB to get those more frequently needed resources. If there are some users for whom faster USB is important they can use thick clients. It should be a minority in most schools.