How do you describe something like Ultibo so that people can decide if it is what they are looking for or not?

At various times, and depending on the audience, we use terms like bare metal, unikernel, embedded platform and so on but none of them really seem to capture both the purpose and the possibilities of the Ultibo project. There are a number of purposes that drive what we are doing but it can be easy to miss the whole story if you just look at any one element. If you focus on just the technical details of creating programs without an operating systems and the necessities of drivers, devices and boards then you might not notice that there is a learning aspect to the project as well.

The world needs more good programmers to drive the development of future systems and applications, sadly there has been a catastrophic failure of industry, schools and universities to educate new generations of developers, many have no concept of how a pixel appears on screen or a packet crosses the internet, let alone the ability to understand the intricacies of modern computing. We don’t claim that Ultibo is the complete solution but without tools that make it possible to concentrate on learning instead of being swamped by the idiosyncrasies of an operating system then the situation is not likely to change.

On the other hand if you see Ultibo only as a teaching tool or a way to learn about the low level functionality of a computer then you miss the fact that Ultibo is a powerful platform which can be used for serious development and creating real products, without the unnecessary overhead and complexity of a full desktop operating system.

It’s a simple question with a multitude of answers, we don’t want to make Ultibo sound too complex or unapproachable so that people think it is beyond their knowledge, at the same time if we make it appear too simple then those who have a definite purpose in mind might think it is not advanced enough for their needs. In truth it should be possible to accommodate both ends of the spectrum, we still don’t know the best way to describe it but you can be sure we’ll continue thinking.