Pros and Cons

Every system and every choice has certain strengths and weaknesses.

Pros

• Central management significantly reduces setup and maintenance labor costs.
• LTSP (especially LTSP5^?) can be rather easy to setup.
• Sharing hardware resources through the server can save lots of money.
• The extended the life of terminals is good for the environment.
• Terminals (or PCs reused as terminals) may be cheap or free through donations.
• Certain terminals require less electricity, so they save money and are good for the environment.
• X11 (the video display technology in Linux systems like LTSP) was designed to be network transparent.

Cons

Keep in mind three things:

• Each situation may not apply to your business or organization.
• There may be workarounds.
• LTSP is improving.

Reliability

• Terminals are always dependent on the reliability of the network infrastructure. (In my personal tests, the terminals gracefully survive short outages. Also, our cheap, scattered network works reliably except in power outages.)
• The terminal server (and whatever servers provide support services such as DHCP and TFTP) may be a single point of failure unless a cluster or failover system is setup. (Did you buy high-quality hardware and get a good warranty?)

Features

• Local Media support is immature
  • LTSP cannot repartition or format removable devices (floppies or USB disks).
  • LTSP cannot seamlessly play audio CDs.
  • LTSP cannot seamlessly burn CDs or DVDs.
  • LtspFS is not as robust as local media.
• A few applications do not support ESounD, so the audio may not work.
• ESounD under LTSP does not support software mixer volume control.

Performance

• A terminal setup may not be appropriate for certain work cases (e.g. video editing, high-end games, Google Earth) that tax the network or server hardware.

More information

See the discussion reasons not to use LTSP.

-- AndrewZ - 12 Apr 2007