[chrisdalke]

There are lots of companies using NixOS for this, BalenaOS (Yocto + Docker), or building their own bespoke tooling on top of a minimal Linux setup.

Although many places start with Ubuntu or Debian in my experience it’s common to invest a lot of time and energy in getting out of that unmanaged setup once the company scales.

[amelius]

The hardware usually comes with vendor-specific libraries (e.g. cuda in the case of nvidia) which are based on a specific version of libc, so then you will have to build your entire alternative OS around that version also.

[chrisdalke]

Which is… never trivial. I’d say 25-50% of my career so far has been repeatedly “fixing” clunky deployments of ROS, OpenCV, L4T, CUDA, cudnn, libc, etc. in Docker and Nix. Fun stuff!