It's been a while since I used it on "embedded systems" but in our case it was running on top of OpenWRT and OpenBSD on appliance-like SOC systems (think of Soekris and Mikrotik), not directly on microcontrollers.
I worked with Lutz, the primary developer, briefly in 2006. I used NewLISP for a few years after that, mostly for distributed computing with net-eval(). I briefly tried using it as a systems programming language where one might have reached for Perl or the then-up-and-coming Ruby or Python. If you like lispy languages, you'll probably enjoy playing with it.
When writing, read your work out loud to find phrases that are awkward to speak, and think of ways to be more succinct. Most people process spoken and written language differently, and this technique allows you to use the strengths of language you've obtained for both forms of communication.
As someone who's used OpenBSD daily as a primary desktop OS, usermount will force me to use doas(1) (the replacement for sudo) to mount external media on my desktops/laptops. No big deal. Honestly, I usually do that anyway, just force of habit. Checking my systems, I only set kern.usermount on my daily-driver laptop, and none of my other OpenBSD boxes.
None of the other changes impact anything I do on a daily basis. I haven't used Linux emulation since 2006 or so, and even then, it was a gigantic pain in the ass. The devs have a native virtual machine hypervisor in the works that I was hoping would be ready for prime-time in OpenBSD 6.0. I doubt it'll be ready that soon. This will provide a better option than the old Linux emulation layer.
Hotplugd is crazysauce. So much you can do with it. Toad claims to need kern.usermount so it won't work with a default install, and will be toadally broken once this option is removed in OpenBSD 6.0. I can't speak for all OpenBSD users, but I just end up putting my sd-card reader (which sees most FAT formatted cards at sd1i) and the first available USB external drive (again, usually sd2i for FAT) in my /etc/fstab and call the mount with doas.
'toadally broken' indeed, I'm hoping that Antoine Jacoutot will come up with a clever work around. That or xfce4-mount-plugin I suppose with doas and a limited permission to run mount without a password.
A cautionary tale: I had good luck with ZoneEdit when they launched. It was/is kind of in the same space as this. Their new UI is okay, but yours looks a bit better. They started out with freemium, but eventually had to re-structure how their premium service worked, and in the process crippled how the free service worked. It got bad enough that I abandoned them.
Be very careful how you structure your premium offerings. People don't like when the free version starts losing features or capacity.
FWIW, Debian's package manager (and its concepts of package repositories and dependency resolution) hasn't changed much since I tried it in 2001 -- and probably even earlier than that. Slackware and Red Hat were my first forays into Linux, and the dependency hell you speak of was enough to drive me to FreeBSD and OpenBSD in the late 1990s.
Hackers do everything they do for fun. If it's not fun, it's not worth doing. It's important to note that fun things can be hard and very challenging, be it a grueling mountain bike ride or taking an idea all the way to a multi-billion dollar acquisition. Talking about how difficult something was is good for show, but hackers are often a lot more likely to dwell on how fun their journey was and all the awesome things they saw and learned.
No, this does not open Apple up to lawsuits. Any corporation has the option of telling you what configurations are supported, and choosing to not support configurations that are the result of extensive tweaking.
Doesn't fail gracefully with javascript disabled. That's three strikes all at once for me. Thankfully, they still have a full-content RSS feed if you dig around deep enough for it. You can say RSS is dead, but I'll probably see your proclamation via RSS. This solidifies LH as a site I will never intentionally click through to.
