Yeah, I've used like Citrix desktop before at my job, but I'm still using a computer to connect to that. I was thinking just a screen that just has the basic ability to connect to different cloud hosted VM's, and no OS other than that. I'm not sure I've seen anything like that before, either for enterprise or consumer.

I think as years go on the network access issue becomes less and less of a problem though. Plus, for home dekstop computers there is pretty much constant access.

Sun sold something calls a sunray which was basically a dumb display. Just enough compute to handle the usb devices and send the events over the network and decompress and display the resulting video stream.

Unfortunately sun tied the sunray to incredibly expensive/slow sparc servers. So while the terminals would never need upgrading, the servers where never competitive in the first place.

It's also silly to have expensive server ram filled with frame buffers and the zillion client processes that normal desktops have for weather, date, time, calendar, notifications, speaker volume, notification mirroring, etc.

A more enlightened approach would be something more like plan 9 where compute can transparently happen client side or server side.

I still have a couple SunRays running in my house attached to a Linux server in the basement. I've upgraded the host 3 times but the terminals have aged in place. They are truly magical devices.