Yocto is fine and very powerful. I work with it daily, producing a "just enough os". It's amazing to produce a full OS with fully traceable sources, versions an

Yocto is fine and very powerful. I work with it daily, producing a "just enough os". It's amazing to produce a full OS with fully traceable sources, versions and licensing of everything, even CVE patch tracking. If you work long enough in embedded Linux you will encounter it for sure. I would advise against starting with yocto for a beginner. It is very complex, most tasks look more like weird magical incantations than actual code. It will discourage many, as things will feel completely incomprehensible for months. You kind of have to know the problems it solves to appreciate it. In another comment I pointed to OpenWRT and Raspbian. They have real world devices they target, you can git clone, build and flash real devices to get you started and see real results faster. Their build systems do not have all the complexity of layers and are easier to follow.