Servers and thin clients in every home is the future they stole from us

I’ve used thin clients at home for quite a while – both for their intended use (remotely accessing a desktop of another system); and in the sense of “modern thin clients are x86 boxes that are wildly overpowered for what they run, so they make good mini servers.”

Recently, I saw a bulk lot of Sun Ray thin clients pop up on Trade Me (NZ’s eBay-like auction site) – and with very little idea of how many clients were actually included in this lot, I jumped on it. After a 9 hour round-trip drive (on some of the worst roads I’ve seen!), I returned home with the back of my car completely packed with Sun Rays. Time for some interesting shenanigans!
↫ catstret.ch

I was unaware you could still set up a Sun Ray environment with latest versions of OpenIndiana, and that has me quite interested in buying a few Sun Rays off eBay and follow in the author’s footsteps. It seems like it’s not too difficult, and while there’s some manual nonsense you have to do to get everything to install correctly, it’s nothing crazy.

To this day, I firmly believe that the concept of dumb thin clients connected to powerful servers is an alluring and interesting way of computing. I’m not talking about connecting up to servers owned by massive technology corporations – I’m talking about a few powerful servers down in your own basement or attic or whatever, serving applications and desktops straight to basic thin clients all around your house. These thin clients can take the shape of anything, from something like a desktop setup in your office, down to a basic display in your kitchen for showing recipes, setting timers, and other basic stuff – and everything in between.

Sun Rays could ‘hot desk’ using personal smart cards, but of course, in this day and age you’d have your smartphone. The thin clients around your house would know it was you through your smartphone, and serve up the applications, desktop, tools, and so on that you use, but everything would be running on the servers in your house. Of course, my wife would have her own account on the server, as would our children, when they are old enough.

None of this is impossible with today’s tools and computing power, but it wouldn’t be easy to set up. There are no integrated solutions out there to make this happen; you’d have to scrap it together from disparate parts and tools, and I doubt such a house of cards would end up being reliable enough not to quickly become a massive annoyance and time sink. On top of that, we live in a rental apartment, so we don’t even have a basement or attic to store loud servers in, nor are we allowed to drill holes and route Ethernet cabling for optimal performance.

Anyway, there’s no chance in hell any of the major technology companies would build such a complex ecosystem in a world where it’s much easier and more profitable to force people to subscribe to shitty services. In my ideal computing world, though – a server in every home, with cheap thin clients in every room.