elk-pi VS elkpi-sdk

Just found Elk Audio OS. Looks exciting, but I'm struggling to understand exactly what it is and how it might be useful. Anyone using it? https://elk.audio/

That might not matter too much for you - if not then you're set. But if it does, using small buffers is hard with Linux (and non-realtime OSes), since the kernel has other things to balance, so you can occasionally miss your deadlines and have audio glitches if the buffers are too small. These guys offer a linux distro that's been well tuned for audio processing, as well as an engine that makes it easy to drop in your effects algorithm without having to deal with hardware support and making that engine: https://elk.audio/

There's https://elk.audio/

Overall there are JUCE embedded support.

If you need more bare bones there are some DSP only resources. Not sure if I saw there the RtAudio which is also very minimal -

I’ve run JUCE apps on embedded linux, a Raspberry Pi running maybe Elk Audio or Patchbox OS might be a good bet

Looks like it uses a "Yocto" script - https://github.com/elk-audio/elkpi-sdk - https://www.yoctoproject.org/

I thought of Ubuntu Studio as well, but it looks like Elk is intended to be more lower-level / for appliances. I'm not totally sure though, but I'm guessing it doesn't come with the full suite of Ardour etc.

I do wish there was something like Ubuntu Studio, except focused on audio-only (and more polished / supported). Mostly just because JACK + low-latency kernels are an ordeal to set-up and maintain on a normal desktop, so it's much easier to just install a pre-configured distro on a studio computer and be ready to jam whenever inspiration strikes. Unfortunately KXStudio as a separate distro isn't around any more. I still use a KXStudio 14.04 install on an old (airgapped) DAW computer.