Since the Raspberry Pi has been released it's pretty common.

Running Windows for digital signage always struck me as an absolute waste of computing power. Just shove some low power Linux SBC into it and forget about it for about a decade or so

I just said "You know when Linux has taken over the world? When you don't see blue screens on billboards."

Same here, was at the airport just last week and saw two screens running windows, absolute joke.

that is the exact opposite of systemd: sysvinit

you can recognize it by the iconic makefile line in the output, which indicates the setting CONCURRENCY=makefile has been chosen.

It booted into a GUI afterwards, and had grub installed.

It's in Canada. Which is on Earth! Which is in Canada.

Every systemd-based distro should look like that indeed

Always has been

It's been for a while. It's cheap and easily-embeddable with a proper network stack for remote management. It's a decade at least, but I can only gauge since I first saw a net guy in an adjacent desk fighting with a parks n rec guy over one not working.

(it wasn't DNS: it was fucking radios/wireless)

The benefit is being able to display 3+ different ads on rotation that change every minute or two. That, and labor is cheaper when they're not 50ft off the ground

Labour is expensive

Probably for spray paint or other damage. Or maybe for identifying when it fails

They have a cross walk now, I feel so safe now.

That looks like a network issue.

assume they have multiple of these displays around and for them it would make more sense to use something more centralized, like zabbix

The one I saw a decade ago yielded SNMP to solarwinds (I know I know) rather well, but they mainly used PING on it to see when the radio link died.

Fancy that -- when the parks n rec sites were converted to e-billboards, they had power but no net line, and "radio's fine". Show me an old linux billboard host and I'll show you a canvas my inner child can't wait to e-graffiti.