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:

1. 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)

2. 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.

3. 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.

It amazes me that people don’t realize that most kiosks run windows.

This story is literally every experienced Linux users first horror story.

I still remember the first time I broke my xorg config on my shiny new slackware 10 install in early 2005.

Here is the rest of the story: the people who chose the subdomain chose .ml because they want it to mean marx-lenin… that’s why it means that for them.

Generally you are right. In this specific instance it was chosen for the fascism.

Self documenting code is infinitely more valuable than comments because then code spreads with it’s use, whereas the comments stay behind.

I got roasted at my company when I first joined because my naming conventions are a little extra. That lasted for about 2 months before people started to see the difference in legibility as the code started to change.

One of the things I tell my juniors is, “this isn’t the 80s. There isn’t an 80 character line limit. The computer doesn’t benefit from your short variable names. I should be able to read most lines of code as a single non-compound sentence in English with only minor tweaks and the English sentence should be what is happening in most of those lines of code.”