honeycombOS is an embedded Linux distro designed for IOTA nodes, clients and tangle-related tools (and supported by the IOTA ecosystem development fund). Based on Yocto's reference distro Poky and built using OpenEmbedded's build framework and cross-compile environment and tools from Yocto Project. honeycombOS is meant to be as minimalist and lightweight as possible, so there's no graphical user interfaces, everything needs to be managed through the command-line terminal and all CPU power is dedicated to tangle-related computations.

Presently, honeycombOS is said to have only been tested on the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4, but it can be built for any other board that's supported by OpenEmbedded. The distribution right now only has Hornet v0.3.0, a lightweight alternative to IOTA's full node IRI written in Go. In future releases GoShimmer, Chronicle and Bee could also be included depending on community reception and demand for it. The next step right now is to support Hornet as a systemd service by default, as well as Hornet plugins.

For more info and updates, check Bernardo Rodrigues' Medium.

IOTA, as most are aware or to some degree or another familiar with, is one of the unique outliers in the cryptosphere (along with things like Holochain and Urbit, which also don't fit in any mainstream category, neither technically nor philosophically) - one that takes on the domain of IoT and the data-driven machine economy that's emerging on the future horizon. IoT, as IOTA co-founder Sergei Ivancheglo explained in a blog post awhile ago, is not part of the existing human-centric server-client Internet infrastructure, but a separate, parallel domain of connectivity of its own. One characterized by self-organizing stochastic ad hoc networks and meshnets, coordination principles such as swarm intelligence (for which IOTA develops a separate kind of node software, one where a number of devices act together as a single entity using a single instance of the tangle) and granular precision of measurement, computation and resource allocation (fulfilled by the IOTA token as the unit of accounting, measurement and exchange of value, etc. - but not as store of value, given the dynamic nature of the systems involved).

IOTA can be said to be the technology meant to democratize machine learning and AI as publicly accessible on-demand services, and not proprietary technologies operating in the background as programmed to invisibly trick, manage, manipulate and exploit us, as the end users, for the profit of either one of few tech giants that have gone to monopolize much of the internet. An ambitious and very diverse project with a lot of academic and institutional involvement, IOTA is also at the same time largely driven by an enthusiastic community of tech oriented people who actively experiment and tinker with the possibilities of what IOTA unravels. And a dedicated IOTA Linux distribution for embedded and IoT devices is certainly a much needed addition to the toolbox.

Also, just BTW, the IOTA public forum/board dedicated to discussion of ideas and such (like what ethresear.ch is to Ethereum) is located at iota.cafe.