[yoe]

The following article is a well-written description of the tradeoffs between Yocto and Debian for embedded systems by Richard Weinberger.

For the [yoe] build project, I am prioritizing one thing above all else: the day-to-day embedded Linux developer experience.

I’ve been building products using embedded Linux for the past 20 years.

A build system is a lot of small pieces — feeds, units, dependencies, task steps, sandboxes.

The last few posts have been about reach: a Debian backend, then Ubuntu almost for free, so a [yoe] project can now build Alpine, Debian, and Ubuntu side by side.

Standing up the Debian backend was real work — mmdebstrap rootfs assembly, .deb packaging, on-device apt, a glibc toolchain alongside the musl one.

[yoe] started Alpine-first: musl, busybox, OpenRC, and apk.

Thinking competitively comes naturally - our society trains us for it.

[yoe] can now build and run a Qt application, shown in a short demo video.

The Qt post mentioned that [yoe] pulls packages from Alpine and presents the prebuilt binaries as virtual units.

[yoe] can now build itself.

[yoe] now boots a Beagle Play.

A terminal UI looks primitive next to a web app or a native desktop app, and those alternatives are genuinely more capable.

Editing the source of a unit is one of the most common things you do while building an embedded Linux system.

LTS stands for Long-Term Support, which refers to software versions that receive updates, bug fixes, and security patches for an extended period, typically aimed at providing stability and reliability.

Application developers reach for pip install or npm install without thinking.

A build system is easier to evaluate when you can watch it in motion.

Seven weeks ago we started experimenting to find out.

After years of maintaining and shipping products with the Yoe Distribution, we kept running into the same friction — much of it inherited from how embedded Linux has historically been built.