The Raspberry Pi is a learning platform, first and foremost. This is actually a great learning project for someone to understand what goes into a Linux system.
> If I were developing an embedded project, I don't know about you, but I would suggest focusing on the project itself might be a nice idea, not wasting time on things like a custom OS
Using an off the shelf distribution is ideal your goal is rapid prototyping, but most real-world embedded projects end up requiring custom distributions sooner or later. Distributions tailored to interactive use tend not to be so great for distributing and upgrading predictable firmware. You really want all of your devices in a known state, not a random mix of package versions depending on when they last ran ‘apt-get upgrade’, for example.
In production-grade products, the OS is often built with tools like Buildroot or OpenEmbedded (Yocto), not from scratch. However, doing a tutorial like this once is a good learning exercise.
> If I were developing an embedded project, I don't know about you, but I would suggest focusing on the project itself might be a nice idea, not wasting time on things like a custom OS
Using an off the shelf distribution is ideal your goal is rapid prototyping, but most real-world embedded projects end up requiring custom distributions sooner or later. Distributions tailored to interactive use tend not to be so great for distributing and upgrading predictable firmware. You really want all of your devices in a known state, not a random mix of package versions depending on when they last ran ‘apt-get upgrade’, for example.
In production-grade products, the OS is often built with tools like Buildroot or OpenEmbedded (Yocto), not from scratch. However, doing a tutorial like this once is a good learning exercise.