Don’t know who downvoted you but that was absolutely how it was and woe if you had a damaged disk. I remember when it came out on CD how much of a night and day difference it was.

Yup. That’s another reason we don’t have individual systems. And most thin clients aren’t designed to connect 1:1 to a VM. They usually need a broker of some sort.

In our case we have over 1500 employees using it, but only about 500 at a time. It’s an extreme waste of resources to have to provision 3x the hardware rather than use ephemeral systems. Also it’s much easier to patch a “gold” image and recompose entire pools than have to manage all of the systems as if they were full on laptops. Just to name a couple things off the top of my head.

Now what about EUC replacements. That’s the more sticky situation.

If you’re having trouble with sub-100 you’re doing it wrong. I manage a 5,000+ user environment without a lot of overhead. Having AADC and being tied to on-premise AD greatly helps a lot of it. Also utilizing Intune.

This may be what you’re looking for. Treat the system like a VDI install when you’re installing things and look for “machine-wide” installers. Also consider getting FSLogix (free from Microsoft) to put user profiles in portable containers.

This is what it was for us too.