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mY general question above and simple - can I compile Dalvik VM for WinCE? In particular, I want to run some android-compatible projects under WinCE 5.0. Obviously, it's sounds afraid, but interesting for me:)
I don't think it would help you. In fact, since the code is just Java, you could compile it for regular JVM and there are some for WinCE. The problem is you'd need the user interface and system libraries and porting those would be huge amount of work.
If you are writing the application, the best I can suggest is that you use some kind of portability layer. There are e.g. J2ME polish, LWUIT (Android port) and certainly more. With those you will be able to run on most mobile devices that have Java.
On Windows I've been using C#/.NET to develop both quick and simple CLI utilities as well as big WinForms/WPF applications. Visual studio played a big part in this choice but also the language and libraries allowed me to program wide range of applications without much hassle.
I'm now looking for a similar language, or more languages, on Linux. The best choice for GUI, multi-platform applications seems to be QT, usually with C++. For console utilities the best choice seems to be some scripting language like Python. However, C++ isn't a high-level language like C# and many tasks are unnecessarily more complicated (since usually I don't look for high performance in GUI applications) and scripting languages are slower and have a higher startup time.
So, what are your languages/libraries of choice when developing applications for Linux, both ten-minute utilities and large complex GUI systems.
After a 13 year rollercoaster ride through C, C++ and Ruby, I moved to Smalltalk (Squeak and Pharo) for all my development - web, scripting (just starting here), and desktop GUI apps.
Trust me, no one was more surprised than me, but Ruby got me hooked on dynamic languages, and combined with Smalltalk's live environment, I am high on OO Koolaid. If you've never experienced it, check out this screencast: http://www.pharocasts.com/2010/02/programming-with-live-objects.html
Warning - although the language is beautifully simple, it will take a while to wean off of many unnecessary and complicated, but cherished, distractions e.g. files, databases, compile cycles, etc. Luckily the community is very friendly and extremely helpful.
Also, Squeak/Pharo run on top of a VM which works in (at least) linux, windows, and Mac, so you can develop (and share) anywhere.
Have a look at Monodevelop, It is C# and offers similar functionality as the one you are used to. And above all: it comes from the same company behind C#.
As you mention: Qt is also a possibility and one I've been using extensively. Of course, you will need to develop in C++ then. The tool you want to look at is qt-assistent.
You might be interested in wxwidgets,
http://wxwidgets.org/
regards,
/t
I use python and gtk to develop GUI applications.
With glade as UI editor you can quickly setup your application.
Doing the same thing with python/Qt(or whatever Graphical library you want) should be easily doable as well.
See here : http://docs.python.org/faq/gui.html
Python can make linux system calls; use
import os
os.system("yourFavouriteSystemCall")
Additionally, PyQt4 gives you simple access to the GUI framework Qt4. This could be a good bet for your needs.
Another option is to use QT or Wx with Python or some other scripting language
You can either use QT with Python, or Mono since you already have experience on .NET.
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Can someone suggest what's the best uses for those libraries today? Is it just GUI, or do they have database, XML, networking, threading, etc support too?
I was reading about them, and considered starting to learning/using one of them.
What is the most common one? What's the difference between them? Why would you choose one over the other?
As you seem to primarily target Linux, then the choice mostly depends on the programming language you want to use.
If you code in C, then obviously go for GTK+
If you code in C++, go for Qt, otherwise you will need Gtkmm (a C++ wrapper over GTK+)
If you code in Python, both GTK+ and Qt have bindings for the language: see PyGtk, PyQt and PySide (the one launched by Nokia themselves).
If you code in Java, Qt is no more a viable option imho as Nokia discontinued Qt Jambi (the Java bindings for Qt).
Also, Qt is more top-notch regarding its scenegraph QGraphicsScene API, its scripting engine built over Javascript Core (the engine powering WebKit), its state machine and animations framework, and the declarative UI.
GTK+ doesn't offer that much although you can use Clutter alongside with it.
If you're specifically looking into DB, XML (GTK+ has a parser for a subset of XML) and threading (GTK+ has GLib) features then Qt will offer all that in QtSql, QtXml and QtConcurrent.
All in all, I would say Qt is a sure choice. But GTK+ is very capable as well.
I'm not sure you will get a crystal clear answer for your question, which explains why some people keep preferring Gnome over KDE or vice-versa. Choose what works best for you.
PS: I you plan to also target Symbian, then go for Qt.
EDIT: Something that is also great with Qt is QtWebView: it brings Chromium into your Qt application to display web content. Others are embedding web content into their application using for instance Awesomium or Berkelium.
I've used GTK+, QT and wxWidgets before. Here's a brief summary:
For my first cross platform UI project I decided to go for wxWidgets mainly because at the time the license wasn't as restrictive as QT's (QT was GPL and only for Linux) and it had platform specific UI (unlike GTK). The project worked out well but there were quite a few glitches getting it to compile and run properly in other platforms - sometimes some events were fired up differently and such. Also GDI in wxWidgets was pretty slow.
Next I used GTK for a different project in python. For this I used the python bindings and everything worked out more or less smoothly. I didn't quite like the fact that the UI didn't look native on Windows and Mac and also when you launch a GTK+ app it always debug outputs loads of CRITICAL warnings which seem fine to ignore. :S
Finally, I did a very simple QT project now that Nokia has acquired it and was brilliant. The best of the three. First off, if you're not an old schooler who prefers VI or Emacs, QtCreator is brilliant. I really love VI and used it for years but I much prefer QtCreator for C++ QT projects. Regarding the library I also liked a lot the documentation and the APIs provided. QT has a concept of slots and signals which introduce new C++ keywords and a preprocessor. Basically, after reading a tutorial you'll get it easily and will start to love it. I'm now doing iPhone dev and it does feel a bit like Cocoa's/Interface Builder's UI paradigm.
Summary: I'd go for QT hands down. The license is pretty good and the SDK and documentation really nice.
I have never used GTK, but from my personal experience using Qt:
It is much more than a simple GUI. It's a whole application framework. I used to think of it as the Java libraries for C++. It provides all you mention -- database, XML, networking and threading, and more. It also provides things such as containers and iterators, and counterparts to a number of boost libraries.
The thing that impressed me most when starting to use Qt was the extremely extensive documentation. You get a program called Qt Assistant, which provides fully indexed and searchable API documentation on your desktop, as well as numerous code examples and tutorials. I found it made a big difference in searching the web each time for API info. Very quick access when you need to remember a method signature.
I am not sure which is most common; that's probably hard to measure accurately. They're certainly both popular. As Gnome is the default desktop of Ubuntu, and Gnome sits on top of GTK, it obviously has widespread usage. Of course, KDE is very popular as well. Nokia is heavily pushing Qt in the mobile space -- their Maemo OS, used on the new N900 for example, is soon to switch to Qt as the default toolkit (currently it is GTK.) I believe Qt will also soon become the default toolkit for Symbian OS.
I have not used Qt Creator, but I have heard many good things about it. It is a C++ IDE with obvious heavy integration with Qt. It also has fake vim emulation which is always nice if you like that kind of thing!
Qt uses qmake for build configuration. I found this much nicer than having to write your own makefiles. I do not know what GTK uses for building.
A couple of things I found a bit offputting with Qt at first was its big uses of preprocessor macros. The signal/slots system provides a nice mechanism for event/message passing in your application, but it does feel a bit like magic that may not be easily portable to another toolkit if you ever want to. Also, the moc (meta-object compiler), while I'm not entirely sure what it does, also feels a bit too much like magic going on behind the scenes.
All in all, though, I would recommend Qt, particularly if you are learning. It has really amazing documentation and a nice IDE, and busy forums. You'll be able to build C++ apps very rapidly with it, particularly with the QML coming in 4.7.
It probably depends on what you want to do. I would recommend Qt, because it's more than GUI, it has nice Python bindings (so does Gtk), and GUI libraries themselves are (subjectively speaking) more pleasant then Gtk.
Gtk is on the other hand more common in linux world, so you can probably get more help on the web. Reason for widespread of Gtk probably has more to do with Gnome and Ubuntu, rather then technical merits, but if you want you software to blend nicely with those two, you'll achieve that more easily with Gtk.
Qt for one sure has solid DB, network, threading support etc... It does a lot more then just cross-platform GUI (and it does most of it quite well).
I'd recommend it over GTK+.
Qt. It's not only object oriented, is "good" object oriented.
It's based on a "subset" of C++ that doesn't rely on the obscurity of C++ (but you are allowed to stick with them, if you fancy masochism ;) ).
It has a strong momentum now that Nokia bought it (actually Nokia did ~2/3 years ago). It's going to be in all Nokia AND Intel mobile devices (smartphones, netbooks, tablets).
It's the backbone of KDE, so it's very mature, but it's designed in a very flexible way, that makes it possible to support TODAY all the latest "cool stuff" that a more-then-just-GUI framework should have.
Go for it.
Just adding QT advantages to other answers.. QT has great documentation, its own IDE & GUI creator and enhances C++ with some new concepts like slots/signals (basically events).
I am not a GTK developer, so I can't compare those to the GTK world :(
It also looks like Nokia is about to use Qt everywhere, like on Maemo
If you want your app to run on iOS, Android, Blackberry, other mobile platforms, Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux, use Qt.
qt-project.org
If the Mono project is successful it will pave the way for commercial software on non-Windows platforms.
I am interested in the prospect of writing and selling commercial software for the Mono platform along the lines of our existing Smoke Vector Graphics (OCaml) and F# for Visualization (.NET) products. Are any commercial library developers already building upon Mono and, if so, are they turning a profit from it?
Also, will it be feasible to write the software in Microsoft's F# language or will Mono have trouble with ILX?
Mono is a perfectly valid platform for running commercial software as a lot of companies have already proven. Some of them you can see here but there is a lot of which you will never hear about as they are running Mono in embedded environments (Sandisk Salsa mp3 player). From the latest news, Electronic Arts is going to use Mono for Sims3. How is that for an argument?
One of the main points of Mono is minimizing the effort for developers coming from Windows to Linux. In most cases no additional effort is required to make the same software that you already have on Windows, run on Linux, MacOS and other platforms in Mono.
Just to clarify some things that other people answering your question conveniently forgot about. Most of Mono (recently even the compiler) is licensed under MIT/X11 license which allows you to pretty much deploy it in under and conditions you see fit. There is no GPL "cancer" that some people seem to be so afraid of.
Personally, I have been playing with F# and Gtk# in Mono and I loved the experience. More about it here. This was possible due to the fact that the F# team has made sure that F# can run on Mono and they provided a simple Linux installer in their release. This should also be a signal that Mono is regarded as serious alternative to .Net, even by Microsoft.
The Mono project lists a number of successful commercial projects here, and I would particularly point out Unity as being one of the more notable ones.
My figures speak against it, we developed Qide 10 years ago and got 4 or so buys. We got at least a few hundred time more on Windows. The state of tools on Linux can just be named bad. Agreed you have wonderful things there but if you use GPLd software you will drown in their license stuff. There does exist one debugger really and one C compiler it gdb and gcc, despite the efforts of Intel and if you come along into some less well known language you got nothing. Ever tried ProjectCenter (Objective C development environment)? , the debuggers are mostly clis and you have to type info reg to get info about registers. DDD works very funny, it's one tools that while scrolling did not get that right, you scroll up you have to scroll the mouse wheel down. It's also unbelievable slow to scroll it's just as if the BOFH wants to make a joke of you.
Well I could argue about the even sader state on IBM AIX. What you have to pay to IBM is way beyond any reason...
So maybe you're luckier than we are. But I'm mostly fed up with trying to earn money with "application" development on Linux. The best I can say is that Linux works well for setting up net infrastructure, there you got decent payments, but with programming tools, forget it.
Regards
Linux people are notoriously thrifty, so I'd consider the ROI.
Do you really want to spend your resources to target a group that has less than 10% market adoption, and out of that 10%, only 1% would be interested in your product, and only %0.01 percent would pay for it?
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Now I'm sure we're all well aware of the relative merits of Linux vs Windows Desktop. However I've heard much less about the world of embedded development. I'm mainly interested in solutions for industry and am therefore uninterested about the IPhone or Android and more interested in these two OSes.
What are the relative trade-offs between the two platforms in the embedded world? If you were considering building a box for a specific project with custom hardware, a partially customised OS and a custom app then which would you choose and why?
I would assume that Windows CE wins on tools and Linux wins on both cost and possibly performance. However this is just utter speculation. Does anyone have any facts or experience of the two?
I worked for several years at a company that provided both CE and Linux for all of their hardware, so I'm fairly familiar with both sides of this equation.
Tools: Windows CE tools certainly are better than those provided by Linux, though the linux tools are certainly getting better.
Performance: Windows CE is real-time. Linux is not. The linux kernel is not designed for determinism at all. There are extensions that you can add to get sort-of real time, but CE beats it.
Cost: This is an area of great misunderstanding. My general experience is that CE is lower cost out of the box ($1k for Platform Builder and as low as $3 per device for a shipping runtime. "What?" you ask? "Linux is free." Well, not really so much, especially in the embedded arena. Yes, there are free distributions like Debian. But there are plenty of pieces that you might need that aren't in that free category. UI frameworks like QT, Java runtimes and media codecs just as a start. Also, most Linux distributions with a commercially-backed support system (e.g. MontaVista) are far from free.
Source Availability: Linux proponents may like to say that CE is a bad choice due to lack of source code. All I can say is that in over a decade of working with CE, half of which spent doing custom kernel and driver work for custom boards, I've only ever had need for source that didn't ship with CE (they ship a vast majority of it) once. I like having source too, but Microsoft provides support, so in the rare case you might think you need that source, you can get them to fix the problem (the one time we needed source, Microsoft provided a fix, and for free - which is their model under CE.
Does this mean that CE wins every time? No. I wouldn't suggest that at all. If you are a Linux shop and you have lots of Linux experience and code assets, you'd be foolish to run out and go CE. However, if you're coming into it from scratch CE usually has a lower TCO. Developers with Win32/C# experience are more prevalent and consequently less expensive. You also get a lot more "in the box" with CE than most other distributions, meaning faster time to market if you don't already have these things done in-house already.
I'll speak for the Linux side, at least for the category of software I'm familiar with (which is RF data collection equipment). Or industrial apps vs. consumer apps.
Windows CE (and its associated tools) IMH fairly recent E) is strongly biased to creating a "Windows Experience" on a small screen. The user input mode emphasizes mouse-like actions. Logons, application selection, etc. all try to be as similar to standard Windows as possible.
If a user is driving a lift truck, or filling a picking cart, or moving material from one place to another, there's a problem.
And it's a moving target - particularly on the .NET side. The Compact .NET runtime is seriously handicapped, and important libraries (like networking, data handling, and UI) are incomplete and versions too often deprecate the previous version. . CE seems to be the stepchild in the Windows family (possibly because there's not a lot of active competition selling to the hardware integrators.)
A nice stable rows-and-columns Linux console is a pretty handy context for many (in my experience most) high-use apps on a dinky screen.
Not much good for games on your cell-phone or Zune, though.
NOTE:
I think ctacke probably speaks accurately for the hardware integrator's side. I'm more aligned with the players further down the pipe - software integrators and users.
Choice is often made largely on perception and culture, rather than concrete data. And, making a choice based on concrete data is difficult when you consider the complexity of a modern OS, all the issues associated with porting it to custom hardware, and unknown future requirements. Even from an application perspective, things change over the life of a project. Requirements come and go. You find yourself doing things you never thought you would, especially if they are possible. The ubiquitous USB and network ports open a lot of possibilities -- for example adding Cell modem support or printer support. Flash based storage makes in-field software updates the standard mode of operation. And in the end, each solution has its strengths and weaknesses -- there is no magic bullet that is the best in all cases.
When considering Embedded Linux development, I often use the iceberg analogy; what you see going into a project is the part above the water. These are the pieces your application interacts with, drivers you need to customize, the part you understand. The other 90% is under water, and herein lies a great deal of variability. Quality issues with drivers or not being able to find a driver for something you may want to support in the future can easily swamp known parts of the project. There are very few people who have a lot of experience with both WinCE and Linux solutions, hence the tendency to go with what is comfortable (or what managers are comfortable with), or what we have experience with. Below are thoughts on a number of aspects to consider:
SYSTEM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Questions in this realm include CPU support, driver quality, in field software updates, filesystem support, driver availability, etc. One of the changes that has happened in the past two years, is CPU vendors are now porting Linux to their new chips as the first OS. Before, the OS porting was typically done by Linux software companies such as MontaVista, or community efforts. As a result, the Linux kernel now supports most mainstream embedded cpus with few additional patches. This is radically different than the situation 5 years ago. Because many people are using the same source code, issues get fixed, and often are contributed back to the mainstream source. With WinCE, the BSP/driver support tends to be more of a reference implementation, and then OEM/users take it, fix any issues, and that is where the fixes tend to stay.
From a system perspective, it is very important to consider flexibility for future needs. Just because it is not a requirement now does not mean it will not be a requirement in the future. Obtaining driver support for a peripheral may be nearly impossible, or be too large an effort to make it practical.
Most people give very little thought to the build system, or never look much beyond the thought that "if there is a nice gui wrapped around the tool, it must be easy". OpenEmbedded is very popular way to build embedded Linux products, and has recently been endorsed as the technology base of MontaVista's Linux 6 product, and is generally considered "hard to use" by new users. While WinCE build tools look simpler on the surface (the 10% above water), you still have the problem of what happens when I need to customize something, implement complex features such as software updates, etc. To build a production system with production grade features, you still need someone on your team who understands the OS and can work at the detail level of both the operating system, and the build system. With either WinCE or Embedded Linux, this generally means companies either need to have experienced developers in house, or hire experts to do portions of the system software development. System software development is not the same as application development, and is generally not something you want to take on with no experience unless you have a lot of time. It is quite common for companies to hire expert help for the first couple projects, and then do follow-on projects in-house. Another feature to consider is parallel build support. With quad core workstations becoming the standard, is it a big deal that a full build can be done in 1.2 hours versus 8? How flexible is the build system at pulling and building source code from various sources such as diverse revision control systems, etc.
Embedded processors are becoming increasingly complex. It is no longer good enough to just have the cpu running. If you consider the OMAP3 cpu family from TI, then you have to ask the following questions: are there libraries available for the 3D acceleration engine, and can I even get them without being committing to millions of units per year? Is there support for the DSP bridge? What is the cost of all this? On a recent project I was involved in, a basic WinCE BSP for the Atmel AT91SAM9260 cost $7000. In terms of developer time, this is not much, but you have to also consider the on-going costs of maintenance, upgrading to new versions of the operating system, etc.
APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Both Embedded Linux and WinCE support a range of application libraries and programming languages. C and C++ are well supported. Most business type applications are moving to C# in the WinCE world. Linux has Mono, which provides extensive support for .NET technologies and runs very well in embedded Linux systems. There are numerous Java development environments available for Embedded Linux. One area where you do run into differences is graphics libraries. Generally the Microsoft graphical APIs are not well supported on Linux, so if you have a large application team that are die-hard windows GUI programmers, then perhaps WinCE makes sense. However, there are many options for GUI toolkits that run on both Windows PCs and Embedded Linux devices. Some examples include GTK+, Qt, wxWidgets, etc. The Gimp is an example of a GTK+ application that runs on windows, plus there are many others. The are C# bindings to GTK+ and Qt. Another feature that seems to be coming on strong in the WinCE space is the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). But again, there are projects to bring WCF to Mono, depending what portions you need. Embedded Linux support for scripting languages like Python is very good, and Python runs very well on 200MHz ARM processors.
There is often the perception that WinCE is realtime, and Linux is not. Linux realtime support is decent in the stock kernels with the PREEMPT option, and real-time support is excellent with the addition of a relatively small real-time patch. You can easily attain sub millisecond timing with Linux. This is something that has changed in the past couple years with the merging of real-time functionality into the stock kernel.
DEVELOPMENT FLOW
In a productive environment, most advanced embedded applications are developed and debugged on a PC, not the target hardware. Even in setups where remote debugging on a target system works well, debugging an application on workstation works better. So the fact that one solution has nice on-target debugging, where the other does not is not really relevant. For data centric systems, it is common to have simulation modes where the application can be tested without connection to real I/O. With both Linux and WinCE applications, application programing for an embedded device is similar to programming for a PC. Embedded Linux takes this a step further. Because embedded Linux technology is the same as desktop, and server Linux technology, almost everything developed for desktop/server (including system software) is available for embedded for free. This means very complete driver support (see USB cell modem and printer examples above), robust file system support, memory management, etc. The breadth of options for Linux is astounding, but some may consider this a negative point, and would prefer a more integrated solution like Windows CE where everything comes from one place. There is a loss of flexibility, but in some cases, the tradeoff might be worth it. For an example of the number of packages that can be build for Embedded Linux systems using Openembedded, see.
GUI TRENDS
It is important to consider trends for embedded devices with small displays being driven by Cell Phones (iPhone, Palm Pre, etc). Standard GUI widgets that are common in desktop systems (dialog boxes, check boxes, pull down lists, etc) do not cut it for modern embedded systems. So, it will be important to consider support for 3D effects, and widget libraries designed to be used by touch screen devices. The Clutter library is an example of this type of support.
REMOTE SUPPORT
Going back to the issue of debugging tools, most people stop at the scenario where the device is setting next to a workstation in the lab. But what about when you need to troubleshoot a device that is being beta-tested half-way around the world? That is where a command-line debugger like Gdb is an advantage, and not a disadvantage. And how do you connect to the device if you don't have support for cell modems in New Zealand, or an efficient connection mechanism like ssh for shell access and transferring files?
SUMMARY
Selecting any advanced technology is not a simple task, and is fairly difficult to do even with experience. So it is important to be asking the right questions, and looking at the decision from many angles. Hopefully this article can help in that.
I have worked in projects that involved customizing the software of an OEM board and I wouldn't say that Linux is cheaper. When buying a board you also need to buy the SDK. You still need to pay even for the Linux version. Some manufacturers offer both Windows CE and Linux solutions for their boards and there isn't a price difference. For Windows CE you also need the Platform Builder and pay for the licenses, but it is easier to go without support.
Another important issue is if you are building a User Interface or a headless device. For devices that require an LCD screen and human interaction is much easier to go with Windows CE. If on the other hand you are building a headless device, Linux may be a sounder option - especially if network protocols are involved. I believe that Linux implementations are more reliable and easier to tweak.
With Linux you are never on you own and you are never dependent on one single entity to provide permissions. There are many support options and you have the freedom to choose your support options for any part of the system through many competing sources.
With Windows CE you must adhere to the license and restrictions as set forth in the complex license agreements that must be agreed to. Get a lawyer. With windows CE you have only one proprietary source for OS support and you will proceed only as they see fit to support and provide what you need. You may not agree with their position, but will not have any recourse but to bend to what they prescribe. The costs of incremental components, modules, development kits, licensing, and support tend to pile up with proprietary platforms. In the longer term, what happens when the vendor no longer desires to support the platform and you do not have the rights to support and distribute it yourself? What happens when the vendor moves to newer technology and wants you to move along with them even though you may not be ready to make the move? $$$
Our experience with Windows solutions in general is that they tend to become more expensive over time. What was originally considered lowest TCO gravitates quickly towards and solution that is encumbered and costly to maintain and support. Licenses have to be re-negotiated over time and the new technologies, often unneeded, are forced into the picture at the whim of the provider for the sake of THEIR business needs. On top of that, the license agreements are CONTINUALLY changing--get a lawyer.
With Linux you have the freedom to provide in-house support and expertise without being encumbered against distributing the solution as you need. You also have the freedom to continue to use and support technology that original providers no longer want to support. Having the source code and the RIGHTs to do with it what you want (GPL, LGPL) is a powerful attractor when it comes to business continuity and containing costs while providing access to the very latest technologies or technologies that fit your needs.
I have developed network drivers that work both on RT Linux (to be more specific, Linux preemptive kernel with RT patch) and Windows CE. My experience was windows CE was more stable in terms of real-time response. Frame timings also showed that windows CE had less jitter.
On RT Linux, we had all sorts of problems. For example, when user moved the mouse; our frames were being delayed. Guess what, certain variants of x-windows disable interrupts. You may also feel that you are safer on console screen only. If you have VGA frame buffers enabled, you are doomed again. We had only one problem with windows CE in terms of jitter again. The problem happened when the USB controller was set to an incorrect mode in the BIOS and windows CE was using lots of time for polling.
To be honest, windows CE had more support. On Linux, you are on your own. You have to read every possible mailing list to understand what problems you may hve.
a partially customised OS
Is much easier to achieve if the OS is open source (and you have the expertise).
Android is a good option for some embedded systems.(it's linux based)
You have many experts that are able to develop on this system.
You have access to many libraries in java or C.
but it uses lot of memory and energy.
What we often forget with paid / licenced software is that you have to deal with licenses. It takes time and energy! Then you have to track if you pay it correctly. It involves many different people with different skills and it costs in decision.
This cost is often not included in the studies that show that open-source/free is more expensive than paid software.
With "free software" it's way easier to deal with licenses and you spend less time on dealing with these issues. Personally I prefer to avoid unnecessary communications with your legal / financing team every time you change some pieces of the software.