Ran windows 95 on a thin client a couple years ago.
I forgot that you could just end up with a broken install from the word go. I had to reinstall twice until it was stable. I didn’t do anything in particular different, it just didn’t take that time.
When I’m looking at thin clients for use in my systems, I look at a few different things:
It looks like the 5010s are the most interesting to start with. They seem to be expandable to 8GB of RAM. They seem to have a DOM plugged into a populated SATA port, so I’m thinking you might be able to use an extension cable to install a proper SATA SSD and have decent storage. The APU is AMD pre-ryzen which is horrible for most purposes but I’d say is quite interesting for homelab use. Get some memory and real storage in them, and they’re good enough to be basically fully powered servers for whatever you want. Being suck on USB 2.0 means you’re pretty limited in that front. With upgraded memory and storage, you’re basically looking at something you can integrate into a proxmox cluster easily.
The 3040s are a bigger challenge. Limited memory (2GB soldered), very limited storage (8 or 16GB), and no immediately apparent way to upgrade them. On the other hand, the USB 3.0 port on the front means you can use a USB SSD or HDD to increase storage. With such a device plugged in, the Intel Atom X4 quad-core isn’t a great CPU, but you can definitely do some limited fun things. As-is and without any mods, I’m thinking you could host game servers on these for older games without overtaxing them too much, or fun niche applications like gemini hosting or telnet.
This really seems like an AI generated article to, in a very complicated way, describe of what was until fairly recently just the status quo.
Until fairly recently, if you had network attached storage you could just play the media off of the network storage. That’s just how it worked. People playing media through the command line is something people have been doing for decades. What happened later was the introduction of services like jellyfin that would streamline the process.
Overall, other than the extremely hyperbolic language promising to completely change your life by letting you do things the way that they were done decades ago, it reads like “you may not like cars, but let me introduce you to an amazing new technology known as walking” presented without any irony.
Glad I upgraded before it was too late.