Comment by ewoodrich

I remember my first internship for a Boeing subcontractor in 2010ish went all-in on thin clients for like half the company of 200 employees or so. But with an on-prem Windows Terminal Server as the backend for RDP.

It was mostly fine-ish except for some annoyances like streaming audio being fairly sketchy for the era which bothered the techs who normally spent like ten hours a day listening to Pandora on headphones while making repairs.

Ended up having to block it to maintain decent performance for everyone because it bogged down the 100 Mbit LAN which resulted in a lot of grumbling and unhappy people. I imagine it's more viable these days.

The clients themselves were pretty cool though: cheap, booted almost instantly and ran cold. Until that job I had no idea how efficient RDP was as providing a near realtime experience even when bandwidth constrained.

At my current job there are a couple VMs I can only use via RDP and I honestly forget I'm even using it most of the time until the occasional random glitch reminds me.