>>there's a city near Sarasota, FL that went to a Linux-based system, for all municipal workers, some 10 or 12 years ago. They bought a bunch of dumb terminals cheap in the dot-com crash. Their TCO plummeted, and everyone is happy, from the reports I've read. When a terminal goes down, plug a new one in and you're good to go, right at the same place you were.

Hank

We had a few like that which we replaced with WinNT Server during the late 90's.
As you say, the cost was really low, and we had blazing performance, but dealing with peripherals was a nightmare and that's really why we switched.
Setting up a printer took days!
Things have improved a lot, I hear. Linux comes with drivers for most periperals, I understand.

>>When a terminal goes down, plug a new one in and you're good to go, right at the same place you were.

Actually, I never saw a terminal fail out of hundreds that we installed. Basically, they were simple serial CRT ASCII devices that did almost nothing. With LCD's, I imagine that they fail even less
We had to replace keyboards now and then.

I have a friend who is CTO of one of the largest counties in New York State and he's proposing to do what that Fl city did.

The zero client interests me because if offers full Windows functionality.
From what I see of the numbers, tho, it doesn't look like the slam dunk win that Linux offers.