Developing embedded Linux products can be challenging, especially for small companies building their first Linux product and large companies that need to maintain several variants of their products.

The talk will discuss the potential pitfalls of maintaining multiple variants of embedded Linux products and the importance of an Industrial Grade Linux. The focus will be on APERTIS, a Debian derivative maintained in the open by Collabora and Bosch. APERTIS acts as a construction kit for product configurations and relies on a careful package selection suitable for professional product development. It follows the "only add what is really needed" idea for new product variants. We will highlight the importance of using hardened packages, avoiding license conflicts, and having an SDK closely coupled to a cloud CI. We will use a real-world example of a power tools company that ported a previous hardened automotive Linux to a wall scanner with a small team.

Join the talk to learn from past experiences and avoid pitfalls in developing embedded Linux products. Let's collaborate to create a robust and dependable base system for embedded Linux products. And sorry, this time it is not yocto.