Remmina is kind of the best right now I'd say. Thinclient isn't actually a thing much anymore outside of super locked down environments because of network state issues.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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it's a pretty big thing with wfh
Huh?
Our work from home setup is VPN and remote into the workstation at our desk in the office.
Regardless of how thick my client actually is, it's a thin client for working from home.
Well that specifically is just remote desktop. As you said, doesn't matter how thick, but if that's all you use the machine for, I suppose you could call it a thin client.
A Thin Client (at least traditionally) means it has whatever it needs preloaded to interact with the remote server and does nothing if little else.
A "Thick Client" (never used that term professionally lol) would be just a machine that can do whatever without a remote server I suppose.
Actually I currently use Remmina. It's a cool application. And the best RDP client around.
Then I'd say install Tailscale on both machines, set your network ACLs, and you're all good to go. Super simple.
I already use a Wireguard to connect to my home. As I said. I already work that way. But now I wish to permanently change to this workflow. Meanwhile I do not anymore use my notebook desktop but only RDP. I have a bit problems with the notebook energy saving mode and also have some security vs. comfort issues.
Cause of that I would like to try something new.
I just installed DietPi on my new ThinClient. I use it on Raspberry Pi for years and I really like it. Is super lightweight and comes with lots of preconfigured software.
Am I only one who immediately loses respect for hashtag abusers?
Nope.
There's a very low chance that the OP is posting to here via mastodon, using AP.
(OP->feddit.org->mastodon->here)
At the very least, it makes it quite hard to read the post.
I set up an old thin client with Debian and lxqt to connect to a VM on Proxmox. Got the idea from an Apalrd’s Adventures video about VDI. It worked pretty well on a decent network, but it really suffered on high latency networks.
Our client had thin clients that where managed via a controller over pxe. We replaced the hyperv with vm's in the cloud and they didn't want to buy new PCs. So we got them small SSDs instead and I set up a debian image with autologin and a script that asks for credentials to launch xfreerdp in fullscreen. It worked great (until they finally got new hardware).
I can give you some of the code next week if you want.
If you run X11, obviously X11 forwarding via SSH. It's basically built in thin client. There's also Xpra
For Wayland: https://github.com/neonkore/waypipe
Also for Wayland:
Oh amazing! Thank you! I've been using waypipe recently, but I miss the remote buffering capabilities of Xpra!