this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
766 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59652 readers
4823 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Tons of Point of Sale terminals run Windows instead of Linux for some reason, probably because the software they run is only written for Windows.
Makes sense, but a vending machine shouldn't need a fully fledged OS in the first place imo
As if Linux based vending machines aint a full fledged OS even with a minimal installation?
This aint embedded.
No, Linux is a kernel.
OS is a specific distribution, so like a Debian is the full fledged OS.
So just write your inventory inside the file, and bind the vending machine keys to it, and ignore 99% of the OS. The coin slot I would expect runs its own validations.
Linux Standard Base is full fledges OS then
Yes of course Linux is a fully fledged OS, my point was a vending machine should not need any OS, my bad if I didnt make that clear
Why not? A full windows environment (though not really, because these things run what's called the kiosk mode) can run on cheap SBCs and gives you a ton of hardware and software flexibility, and is also pretty convenient. It's very commonly used for very good reasons.
Let's stop kidding ourselves, the "good reason" is the cto's yearly Microsoft financed holidays and/or too much legacy code to restart from scratch. But from a purely technical aspect, there's no reason to touch windows
TIL about windows kiosk mode!
I can understand it from the perspective of the developers who need to implement all this crazy tracking/advertising/graphics functionality, but imo a vending machine should only do three things:
Vending machines have done this for decades without requiring an operating system. Keep it simple!
Simple in what way?
You could make logistics simpler by giving these things networking capacity so you can remotely track their stock and cash levels.
If your software needs to run on multiple different device configurations, you can simplify development and deployment by letting the OS handle a lot of the low level stuff.
In other words, a simpler machine is not necessarily going to be simpler to operate for the company.
It isn't. It would most likely be windows IoT. it's an embedded windows OS that allows for a single app instance to be running.
You'd be surprised how many things run windows IoT right now...
A low end Windows PC can be had very cheap these days. Why bother doing something proprietary, if you can just cobble together something from off the shelf parts?
This isn't even remotely true. Everyone knows that if you're trying to do a cheap embedded product, you use SBCs and Linux. Using Windows for these kinds of applications is almost always the result of a company having a contract with Microsoft that leads their development strategy towards Microsoft's offerings rather than the best offerings.
Also, in what universe is a Linux platform more proprietary than Windows?
People here are delusional, booting windows eats more ram than your typical embedded product needs to run. Same goes the hard drive.
And this people also think maintaining a yocto/build root image is proprietary 🤷♂️