Well for starters, no scp command at the beginning and end of each job. I'm sure you could work out an alternative solution, this is just one such solution.

Yeah, this feels like a good solution for when you only occasionally need to get the remote machine to do the work, e.g. the macbook example for simple dev work. In that case it probably is more convenient.

If you were relying heavily on the remote machine, maybe using a pinebook pro or something, ssh or rdp might make more sense.

It's cool to have more options though, I have considered workflows like this before especially in the context of replacing my laptop with something like a pinebook.

Per the readme, architectures aren't cross-compatible, so you can't run commands from an x86 box on an ARM box (and presumably vice-versa). That would rule out the pinebook and most SBCs as potential use-cases.

The thin machine could be your laptop where you'd occasionally want to do a heavy operation on a workstation or server on the data you happen to work on on your laptop. Sounds like a decent usecase.

Of course running it there will work too but will need more setup. So the occasional thing is what really makes this worthwhile.

It's a bit of a niche but I see the benefit.

ssh and RDP doesn't easily extend to live workload migration or other forms of location transparency.