I was also skeptical till I noticed 2 huge deployments 1.Cafe Cofee Day is India's largest chain of cafes, sort of India's Starbucks. Their billing machines seem to be a custom Linux that boots into a console application (tastefully made)that's used for billing, taking orders at the counter, upload data etc. 2. Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India the country's largest Insurance company with thousands of branches has rolled out Linux desktops a couple of years back.
I would just like to add that in some cases linux can be better than windows at emulating old dos applications. I believe some large companies write application code based in the console because they stream the applications from some central server and not having a GUI puts less stress on the network, this is especially true for older companies. I worked at a call center for a while and we used multiple ancient dos applications running on windows xp to fill orders. The only other thing the desktops were used for was logging into your personal account and approving hours and looking at your schedule, which was done through some web app.
