True, they probably didn't read the article - but their claim is still relevant.
We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination, even though our PC's are more than capable of doing this - and the underlying technology is all right there in the kernel - but distro's just don't seem to be catering to this need, since the market hasn't identified it as something that users want.
But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption. I see no reason why this isn't practical, especially in cubicle environments - one fat PC for 4 or 5 people, who are mostly just doing web browsing, document editing, and ssh'ing to things, seems like a very interesting and viable service to deliver, distro-wise.
I wonder which distro's are closer to achieving this target, in the grand scheme of things .. seems to me its only a matter of configuring the X server properly, with multiple independent display units, and getting the USB keyboard/mouse dance started ..
We really abandoned the idea when computers got so cheap that you could just have a separate computer at each station. Mini PCs are $200, how will your solution compete with that? Thin clients won't get much cheaper than that as they have all the same hardware. Thin-client-less multi-user systems might, but the extra administration complexity ($howmany per sysadmin hour?) will make it a tight squeeze and you may as well just stick with what's familiar.
> We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination...
> But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption...
That makes no sense, for a few reasons:
The shared computer model is generally replaced by RDP (or similar) to a VM running in the cloud.
Vast majority of people use laptops or other portable computers; using networked applications where resource sharing happens "in the cloud": IE, web applications. The portability of laptops trumps stationary computers.
Furthermore, with modern economics, the computing power to do basic computing is so cheap that "dumb terminals" don't make sense anymore: A computer powerful enough to run a web browser costs about the same as what it would take to make a "dumb terminal".
Remember, a typical smart TV is a computer powerful enough to run a web browser or a general office suite.
We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination, even though our PC's are more than capable of doing this - and the underlying technology is all right there in the kernel - but distro's just don't seem to be catering to this need, since the market hasn't identified it as something that users want.
But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption. I see no reason why this isn't practical, especially in cubicle environments - one fat PC for 4 or 5 people, who are mostly just doing web browsing, document editing, and ssh'ing to things, seems like a very interesting and viable service to deliver, distro-wise.
I wonder which distro's are closer to achieving this target, in the grand scheme of things .. seems to me its only a matter of configuring the X server properly, with multiple independent display units, and getting the USB keyboard/mouse dance started ..