In the Faculty of Science at the University of Waterloo we use X2Go for a handful of advanced Chemistry courses. Due to the demands of other courses, the computer labs we run in the faculty are primarily equipped with Microsoft operating systems – however the advanced chemistry courses require software only available on Unix-like systems. Historically we would simply give students basic command-line access to the computing clusters housing the software. Unfortunately, due to the general lack of CLI experience most students suffer from at that point in their academic careers, it was often a painful and confusing process.

X2Go gives us the ability to provide a whole class of students a comfortable experience using the scientific tools they need in a friendly graphical environment with much less overhead than other methods we experimented with. It is an invaluable tool in giving many of our students their first experience into advanced scientific computing.

- Mirko Vucicevich