How important is Linux?

[Dave Flowerday]

I personally don't see why you'd want Linux on a robot. For those in favor of it, can you please specify in more detail what specifically having Linux would do for you? I suspect many of the reasons (other than the "gee whiz" reasons) are possible with much simpler software.

If all you want is to run multiple tasks with some priority mechanisms, something like FreeRTOS would be much simpler and better. Don't forget that when you make things more complicated (like by adding an OS) you increase the difficulty of debugging. With the current system (which has no in-circuit debug capability), I would really not want to do anything involving multiple concurrent tasks, simply because we don't have good enough facilities to debug it. Debugging a multi-threaded real-time application is very tricky and is really beyond the capabilities of many teams.