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.
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!!
Thank you for the detailed reply, you got me excited to spin a VM with Fedora Silver Blue and break it