I recently got a couple of POS pc’s (Point of sale) you know the ones that are all in one with a base to sit on a counter. The thing is they’re very old non branded devices, even the label says 2GB DDR2 while it’s actually 4GB DDR3.
Anyway, first thing I did was plug in my Ventoy and boot Debian 12 live, and guess what? Everything just works! Even the touchscreen works.
What distro do you recommend? Will be using them in a small shop with Odoo (browser based ERP)
Sorry if my writing is messed up, English is my second language.
EDIT: thank all for your input really appreciate it. I think I’m going to go with the majority of recommendations and use Debian 12 with xfce maybe. At least until I’m comfortable using immutable OS’s.
Personal opinion. If you successfully booted Debian, stick with it. No need to try out a bunch of distros. Debian is well known, well supported, tons of resources AND everything works out of the box with your POS systems. Sold!
I read that as “Distro for Piece of Shit”. I was going to say, if you dont like them, install Gentoo.
Personally i tend to use Debian or Fedora. Fedora have also got a few distros that are immutable which if its a pos basically means it shouldnt ever break or get corrupted.
That being said… If it works, dont ‘fix’ it. Debian is a decent OS.
Tbh when I was thinking of the title that’s what came to mind, sorry for being clickbaity haha. Immutable OS’s have been on my radar for a while I just need to be a bit confident in using them before going live.
Immutables are easy enough. Had a couple of months on the kde fedora spin. Fresh install and youll have no dnf (equiv of apt in debian) or other terminal tools. Might make you wonder what to do. The trick is toolboxes (or distrobox for a bit more umpfh).
Commands like this
toolbox create testzone
toolbox enter testzone
Install a load of shit that eventually fucks up your config somehow… And if it goes to shit
toolbox rm testzone
If it complains the toolbox is still running when you try to delete you can kill it using podman to find its process id, then you can kill it. I forget the commands though
You can have a stack of toolboxes. Gives you dnf and all your terminal tools. Still a few things to work out with data storage since it locks most of the root directories. It wants you in best practice dirs like /home, /etc but thats also what stops it breaking.
If a toolbox isnt enough, you can use distrobox, which can give you other flavours of *nix within it.
Good luck!!
If the erp is Browser based then a lightweight distro with a Browser of your choice. Like Debian.
If you’ll be using it in a shop, as a tool and that Debian works well. Well… stick with Debian !
Don’t you have any other requirements for a POS? Like connecting a card reader, special software etc. Those will probably be your main problem, not the OS.
