pi-gen

Alas I don't know much more than that; I only remembered about the CLI bit in 1.x and went to check it was still there. You may be able to build exactly what you want with the image generation tools, as it goes: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen Customising the OS with pi-gen is not that bad. It's an idiosyncratic tool but it works; I've not used the newer rpi-image-gen stuff.

Use RPIOS [pi-gen](https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen), it's pretty versatile and stupid simple, I could not wrap my head around Yocto and Buildroot. Even set it up in CI so GitHub would build the image and id just get the final tar.gz file as an artifact. It's all just bash scripts and you can basically strip the entire image down. I had no window manager and no display server I was using DRM to show my UI.

Maybe https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen works for you.

Disclosure: Raspberry Pi employee, focussed on better tooling for people building products with Raspberry Pi devices. -- Raspberry Pi provide pi-gen (https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen), which allows you to build a customised Debian-based OS that uses our package list to get updates as we release them, with a low impedance mismatch between developing your software on Raspberry Pi OS and your deployment platform. Since it's debian based, your resultant system winds up being _very_ familiar. We also provide tooling that compliments pi-gen. For example, rpi-sb-provisioner (https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-sb-provisioner), which will happily ingest an OS image created by pi-gen and automate the configuration of signed boot with an encrypted rootfs on CM4 devices. I've used it to flash half a dozen Raspberry Pi devices in rapid form as par

Not to mention that if you really want to tinker you can use pi-gen to customise builds from a desktop without all that much difficulty: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen Worth a play.

This small patch of mine to raspbian may be useful for you, then: https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen/pull/207 The minor downside is that you have to build the image yourself, but fortunately that is a single command once docked is installed.

I love the work you did! There was some rambling about the RPi setup process - I fully agree that it can be time-consuming. A good way to make that better is building one's own OS image. Once you get the scripts running (which is fairly easy), you can customize them to your liking, preinstall your software and config, etc. There's a lot of opportunities to save power and make the bootup quicker if you look through the scripts. https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen