We are pleased to introduce ThinLinc 4.15.0! This release is jam-packed with enhancements, and as such, we want to do it justice by showing off the most important changes. This is one of our largest releases to date and we’re certain you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.
A Brand New Look and Feel
Since our last release, ThinLinc has turned 20 years old. To celebrate this special occasion what’s more fitting than a complete overhaul bringing all of ThinLinc up to modern visual standards? As briefly touched on when announcing the new visual profile, this release incorporates our lovely new visual style into even the darkest corners of the product, giving each and every graphical user interface in ThinLinc a fresh look and feel. However – we did not stop there. As a part of this effort, we’ve also completely revised many graphical user interfaces, making ThinLinc even more intuitive and easy to use for end-users and administrators alike.
“It feels amazing having a UI that doesn’t predate our most senior developer”
— Samuel, Head of Development
We urge you to discover all the visual changes for yourself. Trust us, they’ll be hard to miss!
Catering for the System Administrators
Over the years, we’ve seen request from system administrators for more efficient ways of managing their ThinLinc infrastructure. Even though we absolutely love the overhauled web administration interface, with ThinLinc 4.15.0 we lay the foundations for the complementing administration interface these power users have been asking for. ThinLinc 4.15.0 ships with our brand new command-line administration tool tlctl.
In its initial incarnation, the tool empowers system administrators with enhanced session management and server load monitoring capabilities, making large scale ThinLinc installations easier than ever to administer. We have high ambitions with this tool and would love your opinions and how you’d like to see tlctl evolve with your specific use-cases in mind. Please share your thoughts in the ThinLinc 4.15.0 community discussion.
On top of tlctl, there are now man pages for all our command line tools, making lives easier for the system administrators among you. Additionally, we’ve relaxed the end-user license agreement to make it simpler to distribute the ThinLinc server. We no longer require the ThinLinc server to be downloaded from our website, meaning you can distribute it internally or even make it publicly available in your package repository of choice!
Not Just ThinLinc
ThinLinc relies on numerous free and open-source software projects, as does your fancy new refrigerator and our competitors in the server-based computing sphere. One of the things that really sets us apart from other commercial products is our strong ethos of giving back to the projects that keep our product alive and well. We find this giving and taking dynamic valuable both ethically and practically, and frankly that it gives us some bragging rights. Therefore, let me end this release rundown with a quick summary of our involvement in the open-source community.
While working on this release, we’ve authored over 500 commits that are now part of various open-source projects. On top of this, we’ve discovered and reported close to 100 issues to community-driven projects. All this while serving as the sole maintainers of several high-profile projects such as TigerVNC and noVNC.
As always, this release contains numerous minor enhancements across the board and upgraded third-party components to make ThinLinc even more functional, easy to use, and secure. For the full list of changes, see the ThinLinc 4.15.0 Release Notes. The 4.15.0 server and clients are available on our download page. As Cendio and ThinLinc steadily grows, we have high ambitions to provide an even more streamlined product going forward. We look forward to hearing what you think on the ThinLinc Community.