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.
I’m not sure how well maintained it is, but porteus-kiosk might ve a very good fit for this use case…
Does Odoo need a desktop? If not you could run chromium or Firefox in fullscreen. Just make sure you restrict what pages the user can visit. You don’t want them to have full control.
For management you should setup SSH at the minimum with a key that is on a device that you use for administration. You should also setup unattended upgrades and maybe even a web interface like like cockpit.
If you want to save yourself some time you could create a image and then image all of the boot drives.
Maybe debian or fedora, something that isn’t too advanced
Are you planning on using them as a pos? I’m not sure if an open pos os exists
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.
