Well, the results are in. The top two positions go to XFCE and MATE, which is no surprise, and second-equal place to Gnome 3, which kind of is. Our impression has always been that Gnome 3 - being a compositing desktop environment which either requires a GPU, or produces heavy CPU load by emulating one though llvmpipe - would be poorly suited to remote desktop environments. However it seems that people either have enough hardware to throw at the problem, or are managing to make good use of GPUs across multiple desktop sessions (perhaps using #virtualgl?). If you’re one of these people, it would be interesting to hear how you’re managing your hardware resources, and what the end-user experience is like. Feel free to comment below.
An honourable mention needs to go to i3, which wasn’t provided as a choice, but by the looks of it probably should have been. In any case, it’s good to see a wide range of desktop environments being used with ThinLinc; from the traditional desktop metaphor (on steroids!), to minimalist spatial designs, and everything in between. Thanks to everyone who took part, as always it’s been interesting to learn how people are using ThinLinc on the front lines.
One final tip: a recent #knowledge-base article addresses the subject of running multiple ThinLinc sessions as the same user, and the ability (or lack thereof) of desktop environments to handle it. Read more here:
Why does starting multiple ThinLinc sessions as the same user sometimes fail?
Stay tuned for the next poll!