Licensing and TCO

This setup will not get you out of licensing any client products, such as word processing software, that you may use on the server side. You will still need to purchase the same number of licenses for the products you use.

Terminal services requires its own special license per user apart from the CAL that you have to purchase for any client connecting to a Microsoft server. The money savings is not in licensing (unless you consider that you won't also be buying an operating system for your client computers), but in the fact that you can use older hardware that is defunct by today's standards.

Hundreds of support hours and dollars will also be saved in trying to find drivers for components that are replaced on the client machines. As long as your hardware is on the Linux HCL, run kudzu, and you're ready to go.