atsamd VS meta-raspberrypi

It’s definitely used for “nonsafety” stuff like infotainment. The ATSAMD HAL/PACs are probably the most complete embedded microcontroller family as far as Rust support goes, and that’s a part with heavy intent toward automotive use.

The Rust ATSAMD community has been very helpful getting me going. I've really become fond of RTIC as a way to get a little structure in my programs.

The atsamd-rs rust folks (https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd) have made this way easier! Check out my top level comment!

I'm obviously biased, but as a starting point I would recommend getting an Arduino and following the process in the article. Once you have a blinking LED, try it again using a HAL like atsamd-rs/atsamd. Then try making it more complex: configure the clock and replace the delay implementation with something that takes a proper duration argument, add serial IO via the USB port so you can communicate with your program as it runs, connect some more LEDs or buttons and interact with them, or make some network requests.

The embedded-hal project supplies these for a wide variety of controllers, for SAMD specifically, https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd .

No love for Microchip nee Atmel? https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd

Am admittedly too inexperienced to properly weigh the pros and cons of various platforms, but I find the Rust support for certain embedded platforms to be particularly compelling.

https://github.com/atsamd-rs/atsamd

I have at least managed to get some literal blinkenlights doing what I want on various Adafruit boards with very little effort.

How do you figure Pis have bad integration with Yocto?

https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi

For what it's worth, the entire Pi lineup is also well supported by Buildroot. In-tree, no less.

Embedded linux exactly. Major OEMs are using yocto. Check https://www.yoctoproject.org/

Been there. You don't want alpine or debian. Good gpos, but what you want is Yocto, which will let you build exactly and only what you need piece by piece including only the kernel modules for your hardware, the exact applications you use and no extras, and with a little extra tweaking, you can wire in Mender for ota updates and the ability to push custom images to clients that need specialization, or even fully unlocked images for customers that need it, plus if you're using an SD card, you can send users recovery drives instead of shipping full devices or let them build their own images without your proprietary code

I second Yocto. It's the kernel in use by the OpenBMC project

One last "option" is yocto but tis is not good for desktop, but it can be a fun project.