This is awesome. I got in on the smartwatch craze super early (like sony smartwatch 1), and the one thing I wished was for was some F/OSS to run on my watch (believe it or not sony smartwatch 1 actually had a dev kit), and to finally getting rid of the oddly-intrusive smartphone apps that came with most smartwatches. Hyped to hear someone actually did it with Asteroid OS (even if it's Alpha).
I also thought FirefoxOS would evolve to maybe get in this space, but I was mega wrong about that and lots of other things so there's that. I'm excited that Asteroid won't meet the same fate, but maybe I'm biased.
Also stumbled upon http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Main_Page while looking the repo for Asteriod. Excited to see what comes of this project and maybe even contribute in the future.
OE is very much a thing in embedded Linux. You might also want to look up the Yocto Project.
I know that places like Formlabs use it (source: interned there), and 100% agree with the sibling comment: there's a huge, painful learning curve to get started.
It's a combination of a lot of problems: the question of what expertise level to write tutorials/walkthroughs for, decent documentation (that you think you understand but then realize, oh shit, no, I don't), knowing the ecosystems (man, the sheer F/OSS drama that you can discover while searching for something...), were all problems that I noticed just trying to extend our build system.
Part of the problem is due to the small community of developers involved. There are a lot of ways to package and build your source tree, especially if you draw from a lot of different projects. See the chromium or android projects to see what I mean. If you compare the smaller and older embedded projects to the Arduino community, it's like day and night. The Arduino project has a much larger community of users and contributors which has given it much better libraries, tools, and support.
OE has been around a while, and while it has matured well it is still somewhat of a bridge to building bespoke distributions. It's a great start if you're looking to maintain a custom distribution for a custom product/form factor but it's a bit rough for end users. Worse still, there is little-to-no motivation for vendors to open up their products to their customers.
I've always thought that one of the best things about the Raspberry Pi/ODROID/Zero/Arduino/other mini computers/microcontrollers is that they made it obvious and easy (easier at least) for people to bring hardware to consumers, at the sacrifice of some speed and efficiency.
When the Raspberry Pi came out and only cost $25, it made me think I could write some relatively resilient/robust software, put it on a SD card, put it in a PI, add a case, and sell useful hardware for $50. OE seems like a good step in the direction of recovering some of the speed/efficiency losses that running even some of the most lightweight linux distros would force you into.
I think the end user problem can be solved with extremely robust client-side installers and amazing instructions. If IKEA can get people to build furniture (even if badly), why can't we manage to get a user who has booted an operating system on a running computer to flash a device, when usually most cases are the default case (as in you usually don't have to change a ton of ADB/system settings to connect to most android devices).
I also thought FirefoxOS would evolve to maybe get in this space, but I was mega wrong about that and lots of other things so there's that. I'm excited that Asteroid won't meet the same fate, but maybe I'm biased.
Also stumbled upon http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/Main_Page while looking the repo for Asteriod. Excited to see what comes of this project and maybe even contribute in the future.