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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It amazes me that people don't realize that most kiosks run windows.
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.
Why do these things need a full OS? Why not run a lightweight embedded OS ?
Many used to (pre windows ce), but writing the whole stack was more expensive than license+support costs.
Many still do, but they aren't full fledged kiosks. By the time you get to full HD screens, the cost of the chips needed to refresh the screen in a reliable way outpace the cost of going standard consumer electronics. Cost for parts/replacement is also lower that way. This dovetails into needing an OS that supports those chips, which suddenly we are into a full OS.
Ok, honestly, the GUIs most of these systems are used for would even FLTK be overkill.
And cashier systems still manage to make it laggy and with the occasional freeze until restart.
Who are they going to pay to maintain FLTK? There are still companies that are adverse to using Linux because they don't know what is going to happen when Linus dies. That might sound strange to us, but companies need legal protections that they can enforce through contracts and support contracts make that happen.
The laggy bit can be explained this way: all of these decisions are made because in theory this all sounds "right" (to the company) but then they get their prototype out with a medium level hardware solution and they look for places to squeeze. Oh, you mean I can take this half price min spec machine and it works 98% of the time? Sold.
Im not trying to say these are good practices, I am trying to explain the decisions that are made.
And their XP systems are still maintained?
I guarantee that some of them are or airgapped/private network support was provided in securing them.
The windows compatibility subsystem also supports applications that would otherwise have not supported an upgrade.
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.