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Thin Clients on GNU/Linux and Unix Workstations
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XDA ☛ Thin clients are the best Linux machines nobody knows how to use correctly
Thin clients are the kind of hardware that should be a home labber’s open secret, but somehow still feels like insider baseball. They are cheap, quiet, and usually built to last years in the office without developing a personality disorder. That durability makes them perfect for Linux, because Linux loves boring hardware that just keeps showing up to work. The problem is that most people take a thin client home and immediately treat it like a small desktop, not what it actually is.
Used correctly, a thin client becomes a dependable “front door” to your real compute, whether that’s a server in a closet, a mini PC on a shelf, or a VM farm you keep promising to document someday. It is an excellent match for remote-first workflows, lightweight local apps, and the kind of tidy, repeatable setups Linux users claim to want. Thin clients get a bad reputation when they are forced into the wrong job, and they get ignored when they do the right job quietly.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Unix workstations: The unsung heroes of modern computing
If you were a developer, scientist, engineer, computer engineer, or even a college student in the 1980s and early 1990s, you would have spent a lot of time in front of a Unix machine. Here are some reasons that it might have been like living in the future, given how workstations pioneered many computing features we take for granted.