Our department came from the Unix workstation world, where user home directories shared from a central NFS file server was common. We moved that architecture to MacOS: our users could login to any of our desktop Macs, personal office or lab, and be right in their home directory, with their desktop, customization, files all accessible in exactly the same way on any of our systems. If our user's system died and needed to be replaced or a user moved from public lab machine to another public lab machine they simply got the very same environment they were used to. This worked fine though 10.11, but only half worked with 10.12 and doesn't work at all with 10.13 and going forward. Many applications are essentially non-functional (unless they came from the Unix world).
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to come anywhere close to replicating this type of functionality? A user could login to a public lab machine and get an environment already pre-customized, with desktop, dock, files etc where they'd expect them, just as if it's their own personal laptop, accessed from a central file server.
I realize this is something of a pipe dream now, but has anyone arranged an environment that's anywhere close to what we've had or have any ideas for how to somewhat partially create that sort of environment?
