[trome]

What Point of Sale systems have you seen running BSD? In the US, all the major retailers are either on SLES through IBM/Toshiba, or your Walmart and are on your own homerolled Linux box as a POS.

Outside of that, its all Windows for the smaller chains, Truno and similar will not talk to them, so they get to deal with NCR who sells them a meh system based on whatever the last supported version of Windows is. Even smaller and you get into PCAmerica (Windows) or Clover (Android/Linux).

On the embedded front ($X to $XX) BSD supports fewer platforms than Windows for IoT, you can't even boot it on your average ARM board or MIPS router. Only in high end consoles ($XXX) has Sony & Nintendo chosen to use BSD, which requires a substantial amount of work, but there is significant perceived value by making locked down "consoles" that can only run their signed software.

[ams6110]

> BSD supports fewer platforms than Windows

OpenBSD currently supports:

   alpha
   amd64
   armv7
   hppa
   i386
   landisk
   loongson
   luna88k
   macppc
   octeon
   sgi
   sparc64

NetBSD has "Tier I" support for...

   amd64
   evbarm (ARM evaluation boards)
   evbmips (MIPS-based evaluation boards)
   evbppc (PowerPC-based evaluation boards)
   hpcarm (StrongARM based Windows CE PDA machines)
   i386
   sparc64

...and "Tier II" support for nearly 50 others.

[pm215]

For embedded support, the platform (ie the entire SoC and its devices) is more important than just the CPU architecture. Every SoC is different and if the OS doesn't have drivers and support for the devices on it then it won't boot, even if the OS supports ARM or MIPS in general.

[trome]

Ok, how do I install it on an OrangePi PC Plus? What about on a Roseapple Pi or CubieBoard6? Wait, I can't, there is no eMMC support for the OrangePi H3 boards in FreeBSD, and S500 based boards literally have no BSD support at all. It goes on like this for most of the boards out there, unless you stick to a BeagleBoneBlack or are willing to live with a gimped system.