The LTSP is most often used to turn a PC that has low or zero-book value into a X terminal just like what you would purchase. In such a situation, as Ben said, these PCs would be candidates for the dumpster in a medium to large-sized corporation. But because the variations are typically small in corporate PCS (even the outdated ones), the number of LTSP images will be few; usually one per network card variant, as the PXE boot must be right. In other words, it's often a hardware re-investment strategy. I used to work for a company that set exactly this up for two of our clients.

What we're doing is a little different (i.e. new thin clients, not reusing old hardware) and I don't know most of the reasons for the choice of technology. There is probably an amount of inertia in the current setup, but it works and it's clearly not too expensive. Some of the obvious values is ease-of-replacement and small physical hardware. If whoever was paying for the new thin clients thought they were perhaps too much to purchase, then we'd probably look at real X terminals. Apart from configuring their XDMCP, they'd probably be a drop-in replacement.

As regards X terminology, yes, I was using the correct names. The thin clients run just enough of a Linux kernel to run an X server and a network stack. That's all. All the X clients run on the store's application server. If we wanted to, we could have them run X clients on machines from head office, but we've chosen not to do that.

So you see it's not all that different to what you're doing. :-)

Wade.