That's exactly what this is, a marketing blurb. Was this unclear?

I want org-mode markup support for the wikis and readmes. Github supports this, and gitlab sorta does. You should hook up pandoc to it, and support everything it can handle.

Great writeup. Along similar lines, the East fork of the San Gabriel river is a bit outside Los Angeles. It has a dead-end road with two tunnels to nowhere, abandoned in the 1960s. Below that is a massive bridge to nowhere that connected to an under-construction road that was abandoned in the 1930s, with all traces of the road largely gone; except the bridge, which is huge and is very much still there. Much more obscure is the PL&P trail, a bit above the bridge. Built and abandoned in the 1910s. All in the same canyon!

There's a link at the top of the article for that too: https://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2017/09/25_pole-of-road-...

Modern SBCs are just normal computers and not "embedded" in the traditional sense. You can generally just use Debian, and spend time on the actual project, instead of wrestling with the system

They aren't normal computers in the same way x86 is. They usually need proprietary drivers in custom boot processes, forked kernels with patches, etc. I'm yet to see a single SBC I can just download the iso from the debian website and get going. You always need some custom build.

ARM boards need a custom kernel and bootloader. These aren't things managed by the distro. The userspace IS managed by the distro and IS standard. Using yocto to manage userspace maybe made sense 15 years ago, but it has long since become far more trouble than its worth. Debian supports most architectures out of the box, has good cross-building infrastructure, many thousands of ready-to-use packages, and is non-weird.

Debian handles userspace fine but there is a lot of image customization needed a lot of the time. I have experience with developing images for a beaglebone black, where I forked the bespoke image builder (to create user accounts, mount points, set up udev rules, device tree overlays, ssh keys, etc) and that was a pain to maintain. I suppose I could have create debian packages for some of those things, but I would still have needed to set up repositories. Now I'm using an SoM with Yocto and while the learning curve is quite a bit steeper, it is much easier to customize for our experiment's needs. Also, AI assistants are really good at spitting out yocto recipes (that usually don't work immediately, but gets you 90% of the way there).

You're missing the point that when you're building the product, and not using SBC just for fun, the image you are building, and yes even the userspace, is highly customized. Running a full-blown Linux distro is a non-requirement, and often incorrect.

For more mainstream SBCs, totally agree. However a lot of the niche industry boards (especially new ones) only support Yocto out of the gate. Debian might be "supported" by the SoM/CPU vendor but manually reapplying kernel patches and praying it boots is a PITA.

I agree. In the past, I have successfully used Debian and Alpine for embedded. Never needed to compile OS kernels or standard DLLs, other people already did and published in these package repositories.

Except you may have just a 512 M industrial sd card to run on. Or even less.

Hear hear. That was has been thoroughly lost.

At least with android devices, you can plug in any usb keyboard, and have it work. Those are free, in the garbage all over the place

You can do that with iPhone, too, using the (poorly named) "USB Camera Adapter", which splits out a USB type-A jack. (I assume you need a similar adapter on most Android phones, too, since I've never seen one with a type-A jack built in.)

I can plug in the same USB-C dock I use for my Mac and everything just works on the android phone.

You even see the phone screen mirrored on the monitor, complete with mouse cursor etc.

The sad thing is it is just literal copy of the phone screen. It does not have a "desktop mode".

Can do the same with iPhone. Sending this from an iPhone 15 connected to the same dock + Logitech keyboard / mouse used for my MacBook.

Samsung DeX is pretty good but I think they're phasing it out.

I've used it while on holidays connected via HDMI to the TV in the hotel, with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and it performed admirably.

I don't think so. I think usb-c based phones don't need any type of active adapter.

For example, on usb-c iphones, I can plug my camera with a c-to-c cable in mass storage mode and it shows up. So I expect a dumb a-to-c adapter would work. On my lightning-based iphone, a c-to-lightning cable doesn't work.

I'd assume it's the same for androids and keyboards.

reminds me the time i had an iPhone SE (1° gen) and i could play 1-3 minutes of garageband with my Korg keyboard using it and then it stopped saying my (adapter) wasn't offcial :) the official gadget in Brazil was > 10 times more expensive than the cheap copies

That message appears when the microprocessor in the cable crashes or hangs.

The bonus being that typing properly works (the lag on Bluetooth drives me insane and often a key press is missed)

Or use scrcpy with the same keyboard you already have and save your neck some of the pain of staring down at your phone (as can be seen in the post).

A dedicated key for all window-manager things is what people that have thought about it do (I use the "windows" key). But keyboard manufacturers haven't thought about it, so sometimes reasonable things aren't possible. I don't know.

It sorta looks like they're trying to reinvent Debian, and kinda failing?