Explain for thin clients?

Question

linux

Planirum to open a branch in another city, to reduce costs, I thought to take thin clients. Faced with a fairly large selection, I can’t understand why a thin client should be powerful? If I buy used HP-Compaq-t5000 earphones for a penny, will they work as well as the new models?

Answer 1

there was a good article on habré,
but in general, to reduce costs, thin clients are not always the case. here it depends on the number of workstations and on the required capacities / degradation of machines over time. You can take the bush, but he will quickly die and do not save.

Answer 2

It all depends on the situation and tasks. You can talk a lot about licenses for software, for example, and hardware. But if BRIEFLY, this gives a profit only when purchasing a sufficiently large number of clients and powerful servers for them. For 5-6 pieces, the profit is zero.
At one time they thought, and it turned out that buying a Proliant with Xenon, a bunch of RAM, a server Windows with a license for clients is more expensive than buying a dozen other simple office computers.
And yes, the client does not need to be powerful. Yes, and he does not need to be branded. It's easier to buy a motherboard with a built-in Celeron or Atom and stick a flash drive with Linux or a special distro ala ThinStation into it. You can deploy diskless boot, but this is a big hassle (checked! The problem is not even a setting, but what else can you keep in local Linux). With a penny price of flash drives or SSDs, it doesn’t make much sense.

Answer 3

In favor of Ivan , I’ll say that cheap motherboards are really simpler, 1 small server is deployed for diskless network download of a stripped-down distro with minimal functionality (as a rule, RDP \ VNC and a browser are enough, and the browser is forced to work locally on the computer and not on the server via RDP) and happiness rolled over. If you are too lazy to do a diskless boot, then flash drives =) Everything will work like clockwork, the computer died, threw it out and put another one, and booting over the network will do everything (well, or plug in a flash drive).