Honestly, im more surprised by the fact that these kiosks run windows, than by the fact that it isnt activated
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Software Gore
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As someone else pointed out, it just feels so unnecessary. So much overhead, security risk, and added expense. It’s difficult to believe there isn’t a company that specializes in kiosk systems running on some stripped down Linux distribution.
A question to consider seriously: name a company that has a full OS that supports modern tooling/development environments with consistent graphical fidelity across a wide range of hardware that a manufacturer can pay to maintain the host OS, provides guarantees to OS LTS/security patching and has a proven track record in deploying, supporting and delivering kiosk support.
The only serious answer is Microsoft, and maybe Canonical... But Canonical hasn't been around for as long as most of these kiosks have.
There are a couple of huge blockers for manufacturers looking at companies that provide Linux support:
Industry track record. Red Hat, Canonical, Google and Oracle are basically the only large scale players in the enterprise Linux support. Red Hat basically only provides support for server/backend infrastructure. Has Google had anything other than Gmail and maps last for more than five years? So that leaves us with Canonical. What's the longest release Canonical has? 4 years now? Microsoft has 15 year support contracts. The only other player in the market that even comes close is Oracle (Oracle still supports Java 1.4 for example: 22years)
Consistent graphical performance: until the last 5 years graphical fidelity on Linux has been a shit show. A decade ago, getting even the largest players to support Linux was a huge undertaking. Basically the only consistent graphics support was the result of android and that is basically only mediatek.
Development environments. Windows wins this hands down without even a question. Go back 15-20 years and it's even more obviously in Microsoft's favor. NET gui apps are brain dead easy to make, super consistent and stupid easy to maintain. This drastically decreases development time and cost allowing companies to pay for the crazy expensive support contracts.
The numbers these companies deal with isn't thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's tens or hundreds of millions. There is no way in hell a manufacturer is going to give an untested bespoke Linux distro maintainer 25 million to keep that Linux distro running for the next 10-20 years. There isn't a feasible way for a small company to even support at that price for that length of time.
Oracle and RedHat are the only truly feasible options, and it costs more to develop GUI apps on either platform when there isn't a 20 year track record of known success. It's obvious why companies pick Microsoft.
At least they're not paying for it.
Edit: If you're not paying anyway and it's likely a webapp anyway Linux or even chromium OS sounds more useful.
There is probably an opportunity in this space to provide ultra low cost single board SPA/elctron serving applications. But getting it adopted is going to be an issue.
A good industrial engineer is going to look at it kinda suspiciously. Kinda like how Tesla got rightfully raked over the coals for trying to use consumer grade electronics in cars and their screens started melting as well.