Remote Desktop To Rule them All?

[DMFTodd]

Does anyone have experience with using one good computer as the family computer and then having every in the family connect to it (from their crummy computer) for their computing needs? As opposed to everyone having their own "good" computer? It would seem to have some advantages:

* Rather than continually upgrading computers for the whole family, you can just upgrade one. Everybody can use crappy hand-me-downs for the RDC.

* Rather than expensive video cards for those who play computer games, you just buy one. One ginormous harddrive rather than worrying about space for apps on each computer.

* All software (anti-virus, browser upgrates, windows updates) installed one place instead of on multiples.

* Easiers backups since everything is in one place.

[Merkuri]

Originally Posted by DMFTodd

* Rather than expensive video cards for those who play computer games, you just buy one.

This will likely not be true. One of the things that most remote desktops cannot do is video. I would not expect to be able to run modern games over a remote desktop session unless you have really expensive remote desktop software and really REALLY good network equipment. Most networks can't handle the amount of data needed to replicate a fast-moving image like from a movie or a game.

Honestly, for a home setup I do not think this is worth it. Most things the average home user wants to do on a machine (check email, word processing, browse the web) they can do with a cheap machine even without remoting into a hefty server. The exception is video games and movies, and if you want to do that over remote desktop you will probably end up spending as much on the RD software and network equipment than you would on decent PCs that each have a decent video card.

Also keep in mind that in most cases two computers each running one copy of an intensive program (like a game) will often perform better than one suped-up computer running two copies of that same program simply because there are fewer places to get bottlenecked if there are multiple machines doing the work (for example, no matter how huge your server machine is, it only has one bus).

In my experience (I'm a technical support manager), remote desktop is only good in factory/business environments where the central server is expected to do some serious non-video-related calculations and the remote clients are just there to view that data. Or if you are running one "headless" system (a PC without a monitor, mouse, or keyboard).

You could, however, buy one "headless" machine to use as a file server. That machine doesn't even have to be anything special, it just has to have a network card and a ginormous hard drive. Then everyone in the family could keep their files on that machine. (Just make sure you do regular backups in case that one machine goes kaput.)

Edit: Something else to think about is that if you do get an RD system working and the main server goes down for some reason then all of the machines in your house are now just crappy machines that don't have any software installed.

[azhrei_fje]

Originally Posted by Merkuri

Honestly, for a home setup I do not think this is worth it. [...] The exception is video games and movies, and if you want to do that over remote desktop you will probably end up spending as much on the RD software and network equipment than you would on decent PCs that each have a decent video card.

I agree for video games, but movies can be done using other software without a problem. VLC is great for streaming video from one machine to another (used to stand for VideoLAN Client, but now it's both server and client so the name is a misnomer).

My brother uses VNC to remote in from his laptop to both of his two desktops. He does web development on his laptop and then deploys it to his desktop where he tests it using his laptop as a client. If there's any "last minute" changes, he does them on the desktop and tries again, making the corresponding changes on his laptop. So he uses the RD stuff all the time.

(And don't start on how that's a lousy development process! I've tried to convince of that for the last few years... and just recently has he started using the subversion server I set up for him. Hopefully he begins using svn like it's supposed to be used.)

[Thanee]

Also two people using the same computer (via remote) at the same time could be problematic.

Basically you would just have one computer then, and have to take turns to use it.

Bye
Thanee

[Merkuri]

Originally Posted by Thanee

Also two people using the same computer (via remote) at the same time could be problematic.

If you have a powerful enough computer you could have more than one person use it at a time. That would get pretty expensive, though. For the best performance you'd need something with dual cores or dual processors and you'd want as much memory as you could get.

It COULD be done, but in a home situation I don't think it's worth it unless you're doing something like Azhrei mentioned above where you occasionally want to access a remote machine without actually walking over to it.

[ssampier]

This is the idea behind thin clients. You have one beefy server serving up images for a large amount of affordable clients.

There are several ways to do this. One of the most interesting is VDI or desktop virtualization. Basically the virtualization software resides on the pc. Then the servers can remotely load Windows, Linux, or anything else.

This is not applicable in a small home environment.

If your users just need to browse the web, print or basic word processing, try one of the many light Linux distros. You would be surprised how fast some of the distros are and can breathe new life in old computers.