Re: An alternate Why? @P. Lee
I'm not sure you've understood what I've suggested.
"Multiple users running SAMBA on the same host"??? This is not what I suggest (and I would certainly not make them automount for each user)
If you have your shares arranged in a suitable manner, you have one (or a small number) of shares mounted and 'shared' between the multiple concurrent users of your large Linux machines, and let the normal file permissions secure the files. In terms of the SMB server, it's probably less demanding to have one share per several users, rather than one per user, and almost certainly less resource hungry on the client side.
I'll accept your point about the Internet and public cloud. My suggestion is really all about private infrastructure, not public.
VNC is not actually that much better than X in terms of network use (it's swings and roundabouts, some things are more efficient, some are drastically less efficient), and it is probably much heaver on the shared Linux server as it has to maintain multiple virtual X servers, one per user, rather than just the clients it would need if it were using the remote X server on the desktop machine. And when using VNC, I often find it much slower and full of display artefacts than native X11.
I'm not suggesting using Linux VMs on a per user basis. I'm proposing single (or a small number - possibly VMs but better on separate hardware for resilience) of large Linux systems, with multiple users using them at the same time
Biting the hand that feeds IT
