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Comment by la_fayette | Hacker News Reader

Look for balenaOS (http://balena.io) if you want an alternative IoT solution. We looked into ubuntu core, which seems like an overkill in complexity. With balena you can get started immetiately with all the tools you already know, like docker etc and have a solution that works...

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While balena is great for getting up and running quick, you'll quickly run into issues when more specific application requirements arise, or you need to tighten down security.

It's fantastic for small-scale IoT deployments, but you very much need to play nice in their ecosystem, and there's many features missing for deployment and version management still, and balenaOS and the balena supervisor can often introduce breaking quirks, and managing networking is a nightmare. We're very happy with how it allowed us to get off the ground and running quickly, but are moving to a more "traditional" build using yocto on its own moving forwards.

Which kind of problems exactly have you had with Balena OS?

Thx for your insights!

Another solution would be Apertis (www.apertis.org). Unlike Ubuntu Core, it uses standard technologies like OSTree, Flatpak etc to provide similar features.

Disclaimer: I work on Apertis.

I took a quick look at your landing page, and I've got to say it doesn't do that great a job of telling me what it is or how it works.

Are you able to provide a short summary, and maybe compare it to Ubuntu Core and BalenaOS?

Would it be suitable for shipping appliances? How do you folks make money?

Thanks :)

It is a Debian derivative distribution with a stabilised subset of packages and a recent LTS kernel. Target images use non-GPL-3 software, which some industries require. It also comes with infrastructure for building images, atomic updates and so on.

There's a lot of concept documents on the website going into details on those.

When using OSTree, you can build images using regular packages installed with apt, and then deploy them atomically while allowing to rollback the update if necessary. Alternatively you can choose to use Flatpak to deploy applications.

As for money, we have paying customers.

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