Netcubicle, you’re personalized network based linux desktop..
As they say on their site “Experience Linux without the hassles of installation and adminstration.” Inqub has a new product out called Netcubicle which basically is this…. for $4.50 a month, you can have a Gigabyte of storage and a linux desktop accessible from most any computer in the world. (Or command line SSH access too.) Apparently it’s based on Ubuntu/Kubuntu (They say gnome/kde are both available). The KDE Dot calls it a KDE Desktop Hosting Service.
That sounds like a pretty good way to put it. I remember one a few years back that was based on Mandrake 9 or so that had a similar concept. I don’t recall a fee (or a certain amount of storage specified.) The interesting thing here is that this services uses NX to compress the desktop connection. If you’ve ever got to use NX over a public network it’s pretty impressive speed/responsiveness wise compared to anything like non-compressed X over ssh or VNC…
NX does encrypt with ssh, and clients are freely available online, so you should be able to access it from most any computer. Of course, one of the commenters on the kde news site mentioned cosmopod which is a free service offering a desktop through the web browser. It’s advertising supported, offers 1GB of storage and from what I can see in a quick skim of online comments it looks as though they use the nomachine client as well. So, that might be worth a test drive. Netcubicle will do a 7-day free trial though.