[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’d like to see a solution like the Smart Card-based Sun Ray become standard in offices. Pull up to any client terminal, swipe a card and get access to your desktop as you left it. Get a cheap laptop for remote access.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure you really need that anymore. I can do 95% of my work from a Chromebook. Even if you need to do more locally a laptop works for most people without a Sun Ray type system (which can also be done through some cloud offerings).

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The advantage of working primarily on a thin client is that turning off the client doesn’t stop the computation. Also, the worst part of modern IT tech is messing with projectors/keyboards/etc. for presentations and meetings. I’d much rather swipe my card at the projector and have my current desktop automagically broadcast to the projector. (AirPlay is pretty close to this, I guess).

Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company

[easton]

You can buy this precise thing from Citrix/VMware (I used it with a password, other people used it with smart cards). It’s extremely common in healthcare.

[derefr]

Or from Amazon — their offering is called Amazon WorkSpaces. (I say this to point out that “cloud workstations” aren’t just a legacy offering for legacy companies; the vertical is healthy and growing.)

[fiddlerwoaroof]

The issue is, these solutions are frequently retrofits of a local-first graphical environment: whatever you think about the actual X protocol, I think a display-server model that can be distributed across a corporate network in arbitary ways would make an amazing difference: You want to show something to a coworker? Send them a "window invitation" and, when they accept, an arbitrary window is mirrored to their display. Pairing? Everyone has a common "virtual desktop", and you just have two people's desktops temporarily merge. Instead we have nonsense like Wayland that is retreating from the mantra that "the network is the computer" (Amazon WorkSpaces is particularly disappointing here: there is no way, afaict, to have two screens logged into the same desktop: something that's trivial with tmux+ssh. My ideal is "tmux, but for GUIs")

[andylynch]

We have something like that. It works pretty well, and when COVID hit it became a game changer.

I liked deploying Sun Rays back in the day too.