Our company has been running LSTP on commodity hardware since 2013 for a development team, and I am truly happy with the result.
For a long time, a 2013 i7 CPU with 32 GiB RAM running LTSP over ESXi was more than enough for intensive use of 5 thin clients.
We've recently switched to a more powerful server (refurbished 48 AMD cores / 256 GB RAM) running Proxmox and despite some issues that still needs minor tweaking, I am very happy with it.
The only gray area, and the reason I am always looking for alternatives to LTSP (NX2Go is the strongest candidate), is the huge bandwidth used by LTSP: 8 Thin clients needs a sustained 600 Mbps. I'm afraid scaling over 10 / 15 workstations will require expensive network equipment but graphic user experience is near native in all aspects.
I highly recommend to anyone that is in doubt of using LTSP or any other thin client setup in production, give it a try because it actually worth it in all aspects.
I remember using XDMCP ~20 years ago for this (underpowered machine as thin-client to beefy server, with graphical login). Does LTSP have additional features or better performance?
I was interested in the thin client concept few years ago and tried virtualgl. It is really nice and impressive. There are few different configurations available. I aimed for low latency and 30 fps gaming was easy to achieve over 1gb link (it needs wide bandwith as expected).
I would be nice if there was a video demonstrating the thin client capabilities of this. I for one would like to see the OpenGL in action (yes, show me games!).
Plus, which Pi is this made for? I am assuming the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 (ARMv7). I have all 3 model B's so I'll check this out.
"TrueOS Pico™ is currently in beta status. The client has experimental support for VirtualGL, and limited sound-forwarding availability. Additionally, there is a limit of 5 concurrent sessions on the server side. Licensing options will be announced at a later date."
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For a long time, a 2013 i7 CPU with 32 GiB RAM running LTSP over ESXi was more than enough for intensive use of 5 thin clients.
We've recently switched to a more powerful server (refurbished 48 AMD cores / 256 GB RAM) running Proxmox and despite some issues that still needs minor tweaking, I am very happy with it.
The only gray area, and the reason I am always looking for alternatives to LTSP (NX2Go is the strongest candidate), is the huge bandwidth used by LTSP: 8 Thin clients needs a sustained 600 Mbps. I'm afraid scaling over 10 / 15 workstations will require expensive network equipment but graphic user experience is near native in all aspects.
I highly recommend to anyone that is in doubt of using LTSP or any other thin client setup in production, give it a try because it actually worth it in all aspects.
LTSP Clients boot with PXE and get the root filesystem via NFS, then it uses XDMCP login screen.
AFAIK, LTSP 5 uses LDM instead of XDCMP.
Hopefully, that won't be the case soon! [0] I've no idea how far away the tech is for production use, but I'm quite excited by it myself.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
Plus, which Pi is this made for? I am assuming the Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 (ARMv7). I have all 3 model B's so I'll check this out.
rPI's aren't too far off sunrays which worked very well, but I think ALP is prop?
I've not had a play with Spice, shurely this isn't just X forwarding over SSH?
"TrueOS Pico™ is currently in beta status. The client has experimental support for VirtualGL, and limited sound-forwarding availability. Additionally, there is a limit of 5 concurrent sessions on the server side. Licensing options will be announced at a later date."