This is for corporations too incompetent or too lazy to deploy Citrix infra, so they'd rather rent it from Microsoft As A Service. VDI can be very expensive so this could be win-win.

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.

Yes, that was a first party product, now third party vendors are releasing their equivalent.

That’s exactly what I thought. They look like very thin client I’ve come across and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a rebadge.

1997 Sun rays.

Doesn't it just need a browser?

Yes, thin clients will be invented every couple years. They fit… a niche.

Every 5 or 10 years they seem to make a comeback.

No one reads articles, they just ask questions based on the headline

In the first paragraph

> In 2024, Microsoft announced Windows 365 Link, a thin client for accessing the service, and today, the company is expanding the lineup with two more devices from its partners.