Now it gets interesting… it seems that the OS itself is Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB but with some special OEM licensing.
Reading a bit further it appears Microsoft license an edition called Windows 10 IoT Enterprise for new thin client devices. In fact there’s a free edition which sounds ideal but it only runs on certain devices and isn’t really geared for UI use: Going forward it seems Microsoft have changed the branding for this kind of cut-down devices to Windows IoT. However building any solutions on a Windows 7 base going forward seems to be a false economy so I decided to have a look around to see what was available on the Windows 10 codebase – the results were interesting… IoT is name of the day Effectively all I want the OS to do is boot up, log in quickly then pass the credentials to a pre-configured RDP file using the standard mstsc.exe application.
Going back some time I remember Microsoft released cut-down versions of Windows for RDS-type scenarios going back to the XP days it was called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs and morphed into Windows 7 Thin PC in its next incarnation. The only other option I found was ThinStation which may also be worth a look when I have more time as it seems a bit more involved to get set up and I wanted to stick to the Microsoft RDP client for now for maximum compatibility. Looking around there do seem to be various thin-client “converter” products but again they all seem to be commercial e.g. One thought in mind was making use of old \ low-spec devices that would be a bit too clunky for running a modern OS but where the physical hardware itself was in good condition.Ĭhrome-OS esque distributions such as CloudReady sound nice but come at cost so I set up a little side-project to see if there’s anything that could be done with what we have on our licensing agreement or anything in the open-source space. After some positive user feedback from the launch of our new Server 2016-powered RDS setup I started wondering if it could have a wider use that just the remote access concept we initially wanted to address.