Questions about Industrial (Panel) PCs hopefully supported by NixOS (mainline Linux)

1

I’m building a machine which needs a rugged touch panel interface that I’d very much like to deploy NixOS on. NixOS is brilliant for this use case and is quite critical for allowing me, basically a solo software engineer at this company, to develop, deploy, and maintain multiple machines with some semblance of sanity and reliability.

However, after doing some quick research it became apparent that what these hardware manufacturers mean when they list Linux under supported OS is some or all of these:

  1. You may run our state of the art Ubuntu 16.04,
  2. You may need to pay for the privilege,
  3. Always make sure to direct any questions to your distributor who knows absolutely nothing about Linux and will miss all the important details and take several weeks to months to fulfill the request and will be of less than zero use for any further support questions,
  4. Pay lots of $$$ for us to engineer a special Linux image with your software, which makes no sense at all for my case of a run of exactly two machines.

So the question is, does anyone have experience with running NixOS on Industrial PCs, specifically Panel PC kinds of devices, but having a separate PC and a touch panel is also an option. Which manufacturers are most likely to “just work” with mainstream Linux kernel, if there’s any at all that might.

Assuming the bad news, at the very least I can count on being able to deploy my application stack through Nix installed on whatever distro I might be forced to use.

2

My experience is that these touch panels are usually in mainline kernel since a long time and they are well-supported.

From there on, you can just do your own kiosk stack with cage, etc. There’s plenty of building blocks around the ecosystem for this.

3

My experience is that these touch panels are usually in mainline kernel since a long time and they are well-supported.

Interesting. I have one device (Axiomtek GOT315-521) coming in tomorrow for testing and none happier than me if I got it all wrong and misunderstood the state of things.

From there on, you can just do your own kiosk stack with cage, etc. There’s plenty of building blocks around the ecosystem for this.

Right, the application software side of things is figured out already. I’m just worried about hardware / OS integration because I can’t really afford to spend much time on getting that to work.