I don’t know what these guys are using, but there is remote desktop technology out there that is fast enough to let me play games and watch videos on the server with minimal lag (so useable in fact, that I’ve been using my Mac mini that way through a Windows laptop for over a year now). I’m talking about NX¹ (specifically, I use NoMachine²).
Looks like yet another endless FOSS forking contest. NX > FreeNX > X2Go. Hopefully X2Go sticks. Looks good so far, it has the NX back-end but they have their own clients, Windows too.
When I was in school (not all that long ago), we had a couple large centos servers, and a ton of cheap workstations that did nothing but server as NX Clients for the most part. Everyone just logged on to their account on the cent servers for anything Computer Science related.
Is there a free or cheap way to run NX/NoMachine on just a couple of my own machines, to have a look? Their "enterprisey" server products have enterprisey prices.
Man I loved OnLive. I used to use that (and Quake Live) on my netbook in between classes in college. Now we've gone backwards in time to needing gaming-class desktops again. Shame.
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¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology
² — https://www.nomachine.com/