How Userful Differs from other Approaches

From openUserful

Userful's also produces a commercial product which is free for non-commercial use. Their approach virtualizes a single instance of X to support multiple users. Other multi-seat approaches start separate instances of X (one for each user). The separate instance approach has the following limitations:

1. They don't support using both heads on consumer dual head cards.
2. They are very finicky about the graphics cards and chipsets supported.
3. They are less resource efficient (each instance of X imposes a RAM and CPU overhead).

Userful has been deploying multi-station Linux since early 2002 and has developed some GPL'd kernel patches to help make multi-station work. Eventually we switched approaches because of the difficulties listed above.

Userful's Desktop Multiplier package also includes some graphical install and configuration tools, cross distro testing and quality assurance, and builds RPM/DEB packages to make installation and removal on supported distros comparatively effortless.