this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Public Blue Screens Of Death
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Public Blue Screens Of Death
Public displays and digital infrastructure software failing to do their job because of blue screens, crashes or other problems
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I think a lot of food industry machines do. I was surprised when I first saw an on-demand milkshake machine have an issue and an employee just held the corner of the touchscreen until it closed the interface and showed Ubuntu's desktop.
Makes sense, it beats paying licensing for every screened device.
It's a tradeoff.
For Enterprise the licensing costs are part of a support agreement - and Enterprise actually uses MS support all the time.
Using Linux means you either contract out to a qualified support org, or bring that expertise in-house, when you already have an entire IT structure that's very familiar with Windows (in Enterpsie, anyway). That world just can't get away from MS.
With devices like these (Point of Sale), it's probably all contracted to a third party anyway, which is much smaller orgs, usually (I've deployed a couple). Those companies may benefit by using Linux, as they can purpose-configure the OS and (as you said) not have licensing costs - plus they can run less expensive hardware (which they do anyway, even with Windows, and performance sucks because of it). They likely already have the Linux expertise in-house as they either built the systems themselves, or at least had a major hand in the design.
FWIW, buying a Windows license doesn't allow actually get you any kind of support - you still gotta pay for that. The license is just the shakedown.
Source: a guy that deals with this bullshit once a year at renewal time
Yeah, I’ve had to do volume licensing before and this whole support spiel is bs. Big companies hire support firms like Tata Consulting Services or smaller firms for end user support. Medium businesses sometimes do that or have in house IT handle it. I’ve never heard of anyone ever getting paid support from Microsoft. Don’t even know how one would go about hiring it.