That sounds like a good solution.

Unfortunately for me, my users need to run stuff on specific *nix boxes connected to $1e6++ equipment, to avoid transferring GBs of data over the network to PCs. They're not very interested in spending several hours transferring both ways, on top of the run time for the applications.

But I'm slowly getting them educated, so someday they wrangle the infrastructure to work for them, and not the other way around.