Not much. I've seen the same thing (transit departures) provided by a locked down, CD-booting, ramdisk-only Puppy Linux (of all the possible distros! Found out

Not much. I've seen the same thing (transit departures) provided by a locked down, CD-booting, ramdisk-only Puppy Linux (of all the possible distros! Found out from its distinctive boot sequence messages). Since the functionality was essentially "bring up the display and network, then point a kiosk browser to an auto-refreshing URL", there was no need for the other five million extra features that come mandatory with Windows (which probably would have been XP or XP Embedded). That's not something you'd need a Linux hacker for - just configure the distro _once_, all the remaining work is webdesign.