I forced EVERYONE to use Linux

About this video

The creator converts his office’s powerful Windows 11 render/editing PC into a Linux terminal server so his whole team can share one machine simultaneously instead of fighting over a single desktop seat or Remote Desktop session. He contrasts expensive Windows Terminal Services licensing — he says five users can cost about $1,000 — with the sponsor’s Linux terminal-server software, which he says is free for up to 10 users on a server. Low-powered thin clients, including Raspberry Pis, connect to the beefy server, which runs Ubuntu 20.04 in the demo. The walkthrough covers installing the server as a master, fixing the sudo path so its commands are accessible, creating Linux user accounts (with LDAP and lockdown options noted), granting one user sudo, and installing the client on a user’s machine. He then adds VirtualGL for server-side GPU acceleration, showing a test program jumping from roughly 125-128 frames per second on the software renderer to about 1,000 fps using the server’s NVIDIA 4090, per his demo. An editor then does real Blender work through a Raspberry Pi, the admin web tools for monitoring, session control and shadowing are shown, and the team 3D-prints the resulting model.

Key takeaways

• A terminal server gives each user a separate simultaneous session on one powerful machine, unlike a normal PC or Remote Desktop setup limited to one active user
• Per the creator, the Linux approach avoids Windows Terminal Services licensing costs and is free for up to 10 users on a server
• Thin clients can be very low-powered — even a Raspberry Pi — because processing happens on the server; clients can run Windows, macOS, or Linux
• VirtualGL is the key add-on for graphics work: prefix a program with vglrun so it uses the server GPU instead of slow software rendering
• Admin tools provide system health, user/session monitoring, termination, application and menu control per group, and optional session shadowing

Episode details: published August 7, 2024 · 22:59 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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