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I used to be a big Fedora and Ubuntu user for years. Loved the stability and maturity of Fedora and the driver support and package manager of Ubuntu - made learning new projects a snap. Now that Fedora is expensive and Ubuntu has embraced gathering telemetric data from it’s users I’ve fallen out of love with both distros - Not a fan of Fedora core. I’ve moved back to Debian - 3rd time now. Each distro has pros and cons and I wish there was an industry standard for driver and package managers as that would make adoption of Linux so much wider for general users. I know why this standardization will likely never occur, but I can dream.

I built a custom kernel using Debian with just the bare bones drivers I needed for my PC104. Most of the command line programs were handled by a "kitchen sink" executable called "BusyBox". I just need bare bones for network configuration. All of my executables were built in C and very tiny...even the one with FFTW for doing Fourier transforms of the sampled bearing frequencies. An Ethernet driver to run the 802.11b wireless bridge and serial ports for the GPS and CAN bus interface.

Debian's slow roll of updates ensured that my lab builds of executables could be distributed to devices rolling on the rail cars without concern that it might fail due to an out of sync library patch.

The custom kernel and app executables went from power off to fully running in under 15 seconds. I only had a 32 MB disk, so image size was important and the amount of data samples I could buffer when out of 1xRTT CDMA networking was limited.