[kjs3]

Been a thing for a long time. I first ran into it back in the Novell days with RPL netbooting, and it's moved through BOOTP to PXE booting. Biggest benefits pitched are usually "lower cost" and "centralized management".

As an example, X Terminals all worked this way. Much of the old Sun Microsystems "The Network Is The Computer" pitch was having low-end, diskless SPARC machines (e.g. SLC, ELC) netbooting and mounting disk and doing heavy lift compute via NFS & X11 from large SPARC servers and storage arrays.

You can look at the Linux Terminal Server Project (ltsp.org) for some reasonably current ideas of what someone might do with this.