I’ve been using Linux for a long time. The first distribution I ever installed was Ubuntu 6.06 ‘Dapper Drake’, on which I ran a phpBB server for my school friends. Security was poor. But shortly after, as I learned about Linux desktops (and first daily-drove a Linux laptop around 2012), I learned about ‘Multiseat’. The Wikipedia article has a cool picture of a very 90s looking desktop tower with 4x CRT monitors, and that image was published to Wikipedia in 2005, and I saw it in middle/high school years.

In this project, I explore thin client software, and set up a Raspberry Pi to act as a thin client. This is a multi-part project, follow along below for each sub-project. A Modern Linux Graphical Terminal Server For the first project, I setup a remote desktop terminal server, allowing many users to connect to a single server and operate indepednent graphical sessions. My test bench was able to handle a dozen simulatneous users, and a proper server should be able to handle many more.

I’ve made many videos on Thin Clients before, all of them relying on Proxmox and the SPICE protocol. This works well when you control both the client and the hypervisor, and allows a lot of flexibility in the guest OS at the expense of flexibility at the client. If you want to rely on a remote access / Bring-Your-Own-Device type solution, you probably care more about solid multi-platform client support than flexibility in mixing VM OSes and running with no software installation on the VM.