This is a great reminder that many of today's "breakthroughs" were imagined decades ago. What's changed isn't just the technology, but the economics and engineering needed to make it practical
We really don't have an easy way in the modern era to share our PC's in such a way that multiple users have their own keyboard/mouse/video combination, even though our PC's are more than capable of doing this - and the underlying technology is all right there in the kernel - but distro's just don't seem to be catering to this need, since the market hasn't identified it as something that users want.
But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption. I see no reason why this isn't practical, especially in cubicle environments - one fat PC for 4 or 5 people, who are mostly just doing web browsing, document editing, and ssh'ing to things, seems like a very interesting and viable service to deliver, distro-wise.
I wonder which distro's are closer to achieving this target, in the grand scheme of things .. seems to me its only a matter of configuring the X server properly, with multiple independent display units, and getting the USB keyboard/mouse dance started ..
You could have more luck with AIO PCs.
Still, one of these days I'll get around to setting up a system like this, just for the fun of it.
I can think of a few applications where it would be fun. Music-making, for example ..
> But I guess, if there were a distribution which sets things up so that 4 or more people can use the same PC, it'd get wider adoption...
That makes no sense, for a few reasons:
The shared computer model is generally replaced by RDP (or similar) to a VM running in the cloud.
Vast majority of people use laptops or other portable computers; using networked applications where resource sharing happens "in the cloud": IE, web applications. The portability of laptops trumps stationary computers.
Furthermore, with modern economics, the computing power to do basic computing is so cheap that "dumb terminals" don't make sense anymore: A computer powerful enough to run a web browser costs about the same as what it would take to make a "dumb terminal".
Remember, a typical smart TV is a computer powerful enough to run a web browser or a general office suite.
Just add a video card and USB card for each head/terminal and pass them into a VM!
(It’s a shame combo video+USB cards don’t exist - would save on slots)
It’s not just technology, it’s a movement.