I’ll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!
Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.
I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.
Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.
I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.
Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.
What’s your unusual setup like?
Not my main rig, but my most unusual is 32-bit Yocto Linux on an Intel Edison that I got for free from a college professor that worked for Intel.
Yocto is awful. I mean it has a niche I guess, but there is basically no package manager. Somehow I managed to install a Rust toolchain on it, but it couldn’t build the web server I wanted to run on it.
I’d much rather have a Pi running a sane distro.
Oh, I remember having to use Yocto when I started experimenting with the BeagleBone Black SBC back in 2015. Yes I remember it being very hard to use. I remember I had need to rebuild the kernel to include a disabled kernel module. The cross compilation on my desktop PC didn’t work, so I had to build it on the BeagleBone. That was an awful process, it took about 6 hours.
For anyone not familiar, the BeagleBone Black was an SBC that came out as competitor to the Raspberry Pi 2. The main difference was the BeagleBone used an open source design, based on a non-NDA CPU unlike the RPI, so it meant they published full kernel sources. But in my experiments I found the BeagleBone CPU was much slower than the RPI, and it’s graphics hardware was almost non-existent compared to RPIs integrated graphics.
BBB is actually really good nowadays compared to where it started. I’ve got quite a few deployed hardware appliance designs with them baked in. The real time IO and subprocessor was a nice quick and dirty way to get a little psuedo FPGA
Yah, BBB was horrendously slow. Lots of neat features like realtime PDU and tons of IO, but the only way to use it was Debian headless because a full DE was painful. I bought a 7" touch display to use as an HMI that the BBB mounted on the back of and it duplicated the pins so you could put a cape on it (that didn’t conflict with the HDMI pins it used), but I never used it because it was so slow.
It isn’t built to be changed after the image is created. I would either just go straight builtroot or Debian.