Ptxdist – "Professional Embedded Linux Made Easy"

ptxdist.org

60 points·grodriguez100··7 comments

It looks like a new iteration of Buildroot, which kind of slid behind Yocto/OE in professional community. Is there any summary why this would be preferable to either of those?

it's a decent distro with a much smaller community, I'll stick with yocto and buildroot

Not really new... https://git.pengutronix.de/cgit/ptxdist/refs/

So now the question is, why didn't it get traction in over a decade?

Not excluding the possibility of an "hidden gem" here, and people in embedded tend to be conservative, but to be honest "professional" and "easy" in the same sentence looks a bit suspicious to me.

I suspect those reasons:

- It couldn't find a feature-gap between buildroot and OE/YP in order to differentiate itself and attract new developers

- It is more or less a one-vendor project

It is similar to buildroot, but more powerful. We have been using it for 10+ years with very good results.

Why no traction? Not sure about that. Perhaps it was difficult to communicate the benefits in an area where buildroot was already well established.

I personally very much prefer buildroot over yocto, which feels bloated (my opinion only). However buildroot has some shortcomings that are important to me (for example it lacks a package system, which makes it difficult to do partial updates). Ptxdist adds this and also some other useful stuff, such as a mechanisms for “layers” (similar to Yocto).

I guess for me it just hits the sweet spot between simplicity and flexibility.

My company has been using it professionally since 2014, and we are very happy with the results.

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