[digi_owl]

Unix have all kinds of funny things if all happens within a single box.

If you want to send someone a message, there is write (if the person have mesg set to yes). There is also talk, but it requires its own daemon.

Seriously, _nix started out in the mainframe era. Meaning that the basic assumption was multiple terminals hooked up to a single computer, with a different user on each terminal.

Sadly we have a generation or more that grew up with single user computers, and seems to insist on turning _nix into that rather than embrace what it can offer.

[canhascodez]

Multiseat is a bit complex under X11, but certainly possible today. What do you see as the advantages of thin clients, though?

[kbenson]

I think the point wasn't to specifically lament the lack of thin clients, but the lack of knowledge about how the systems are really designed be multi-user, and actually multi-concurrent-user, as opposed to systems like windows which eventually gained multi-user capabilities, and even then concurrent use isn't exactly the common case (and I'm not sure how well it works in practice, but I imagine with RDP it works well enough on the server products).

[digi_owl]

Multiseat is a dirty hack. It is about using software to build a terminal out of a random collection of screens and input devices. All it has really done is give us yet another "session" to mentally track, in the form of consolekit/logind, on top of the kernel and X provides ones.

And it is not about thin clients, thin clients btw is yet another Windows-ism, it is about the concepts embedded in the unix concept that current day devs seems to either sidestep or downplay while building house of cards in userspace that poorly replicate said concepts.