Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature

You can still use multi-head to have four monitors/keyboards/mice per physical box, reducing your lab from 40-400 systems to 10-100 systems.

Also, USB-over-Ethernet extenders exist, and you could use those to run a whole lab from a small handful of servers. Many computer labs already use semi-thin clients (where you SSH elsewhere if you want a pile of computing power), and this seems like a natural extension.

It's divisive. Some will cheer you on and for others you will look dumb. I'd prefer Lennart didn't make Ubuntu's choice into a We vs. Them scenario.

The problem is that people always argue that desktop environments gets shortchanged by distributions unless it's available at install time.

I have never seen it that way, but whatever.

Yes indeed, my point was triggered by the fact that the support in Fedora for the feature the blog is about is (for now) only available for Gnome.

Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that Mr Poettering should implement it for all DEs, of course. If the KDE devs find the functionality attractive I am sure they can implement it.

The whole point is that I'm tired of this bashing of one side to other, especially Fedora vs Ubuntu: Unity vs Gnome, RPM vs Deb, yum vs apt, one multiarch vs the other multiarch. What a PITA! Guys, do you know that Samsung, the champion of Android on high-end phones plans to have the Galaxy S3 run Windows 8 by October? Let's stop fighting between ourselves: the real competitor is out there!!!

Anybody installing it who don't want to fool around that much should
A) Wait a month or so
B) Be prepared to download about 300-400 MB of updates.

I use Fedora in computer labs and on my personal desktops and I rarely run into problems... although a lot would depend on how many packages one has installed and commonly use... and the hardware you are running it on. I use fairly common, business class Dell desktops and laptops and almost never have hardware issues... so your mileage may vary. I've seen hardware that hates one distro and loves another and vice versa. Fedora generally just works for me.

From what I've read, Ubuntu provides about 12-16% of their own packages that are not vetted in Debian's repos.

I don't think this is worth arguing over but I think your comparison of the stability of Ubuntu vs Fedora was overstated... at least it was from my perspective. Obviously not from yours though, eh?

Yes, I'm aware that there are fiber extensions, but I without knowing the details this does not sound attractive to me if one of the major goals is cost.

If you think about class room cabling you often have to go up to the ceiling and down to the next desk row again. There went your 5 meters... So even using hubs this sounds challenging to me.

For some reason probably related to network effects of existing deployed systems this never seems to work out in practice. Before Thunderbolt there was Firewire and before that SCSI and the granddaddy of them all Ethernet but none became a universal connector standard. The most successful has been USB, which was only built as a reaction to non-technical issues with Firewire.

USB has very successfully targeted low bandwidth devices. even USB2 isn't even as fast as the original Firewire 400 from the 1990s . I don't see Thunderbolt or another connector replacing it anytime soon, there are still going to be a smattering of different connectors such as Thunderbolt, eSATA, USB and Ethernet for the foreseeable future.

The big problem was that even serial terminals were ridiculously overpriced, more expensive than just buying a cheap PC and running a terminal emulator. And actual X terminals were insanely expensive.

You can sort of argue that these weren't 'multihead', because the video signal was generated by the terminal, but I don't think that's a good way to define it. All the processing still happened on the host. Serial terminals were mostly pretty stupid, with the exception of some, um, I think it was Tektronix models that had bit-addressable graphics. There was a fair bit more to an X terminal, as it was actually running the X server locally, but it was still really 'multihead' in most senses. The terminal wouldn't do anything by itself, it was just a smart display device for its attached machine.

It looks like Poettering's solution isn't really 'true' multihead either. It's still the same basic idea, but running over USB instead. And I gather it doesn't yet support regular text gettys, so it's not even a full replacement for oldschool serial terminals.

It wouldn't even be necessary, except for the loss of network transparency in GNOME and KDE. All you'd need, if the desktops still worked properly over a network, would be a Raspberry Pi at each terminal to run the screen and keyboard, and you'd be 'multihead' as much as any Unix machine ever was, back in the old days, and certainly as much as running this solution.

Note, though, that if -- as some people suggested -- I had been running X terminals, it would indeed have been practical for the users to be running X clients.