Have you ever thought about the enormous waste of resources that it means, for example in an office, to have several modern machines running just to open basic desktop applications? One solution could be to “recycle” compus and use older machines. Sure, this will surely not be to the liking of many. However, there is a second, lesser-known solution that can keep everyone happy. Yesterday I was thinking about precisely this topic. With the enormous advance of technology, an interesting alternative could be to connect several monitors, mice and keyboards to the same PC, allowing all users to optimally use the resources of that PC and thus generate significant economic savings and a reduction in the carbon footprint. In addition to finding a way to connect everything, the question remains of how to make the operating system work independently for each of the users. Let’s see what Linux can do to help us. 🙂

Introduction

With the growing increase in hardware capacity, both in processors and memories, plus the rapid advancement and development of GNU / Linux systems, increasingly robust and with better resource management, a high number of tasks can be done on a computer. tasks without getting slow. However, when using the standard configuration of a desktop PC, only one user can use the computer at a time, limiting the effectiveness of the system as it remains idle most of the time, it keeps its resources idle.

With the multi-user configuration, several users can share the resources of the same computer, so a greater percentage of its total capacity would be used, thus having a better use of the system.

For example, in the traditional scheme, if someone is just using a web browser or writing a letter in a word processor, or working with a spreadsheet, or with a billing, inventory, or accounting program, the team it is wasted, as a large part of the system’s capacity is unused. But with the multi-terminal configuration, other people will be able to use the resources that would otherwise be idle.

However if someone is using all the resources of the machine (with 3-D games or something like that), the other users will have a very slow system.

Another great advantage that comes with the multiterminal is the price: it is not necessary to buy different motherboards, microprocessors, RAM memories, hard drives, cases, voltage regulators, and other components for each user. You only need to buy a good computer. Usually buying a fast microprocessor costs much less than buying several slower ones.

Our Story

In the 1970s, it was very common to connect multiple terminals, and even graphics terminals, to a single central computer (mainframe).

However, the idea of ​​using the more contemporary X11 interface to support multiple users appeared in 1999. It was implemented by a Brazilian named Miguel Freitas, using the Linux operating system and the X11 graphics system (at that time maintained by XFree86). The way Freitas did it was a patch on the X server to run many instances of X at the same time, in such a way that each captured specific mouse and keyboard events and graphical