[saidinesh5]

> I don't quite understand why "embedded" has historically meant learning a completely separate tool. I've been building for x86 and ARM servers for 5+ years now, so why should targeting an ARM board be any different?

Because embedded usually means dealing with complete functionality provided by the soc, bare minimum for the init system to get quick boot times.

If you just want to boot the CPU and run some IoT app, device tree + kernel + uboot should be enough.

But for anything with a GUI, You'd probably need the vendor provided binary blobs for GPU accelerated UI, proper gstreamer packages with all the patches to make it work with the binary blobs... properly packaged Qt etc ... Not to mention read only rootfs and A/B partitions for upgrades to deal with power loss headaches.

I haven't used Nix for any of these but most of these things are available ready to use with the vendor provided buildroot or yocto setups. And it would've been just more work to get this all working with yet another build system/package manager