"I know very little about..." <- while ROS stands for "Robot Operating System" it isn't actually an OS - it's just a collection of tools to build robotics-related software on top of linux (and windows, starting with ROS 2). you basically get a messaging system (i think it was a custom thing in ROS 1, with ROS 2 it's a proper DDS middleware), a build tool (built around CMake which itself is built around other build tools...), a dependency management tool and a lot of libraries from the community for anything from "read this lidar" over "create a point cloud from this lidar" to "do SLAM with that point cloud". so you can glue things together quite quick and get something up and running in a reasonable amount of time. and since it's based on message passing you don't need to re-compile one huge binary, you can just `apt install` (well, `rosdep install`, but on Ubuntu it just uses `apt` in the background) the packages you need and then you're up & running. and the messaging setup allows you to distribute it over multiple computers (a lot of setups use this to have the operator and robot be in the same network, running ROS nodes on both sides). ROS 1 was built for and by academia but, through spin-offs and ex-students moving into the industry, it has spread to the industry. ROS 2 was re-built from the ground up for the industry (but still also with the academia in mind) but somehow seems to fail to gain a lot of traction, from what i've seen & heard most universities (be they back-water ones or leading international ones) are still stuck on ROS 1 (which will be EOL in may 😅) and companies are only adopting ROS 2 slowly (i even heard from at least one which just ditched ROS altogether). it also comes with some nice features like `rosbag` which allows you to record ROS messages (so that you can replay them later) or a good integration with the `gazebo` simulator (so you can then also use your recorded messages to replay them later in the simulator to e.g. test code changes). i think the (Embedded) Rust ecosystem nowadays has a similar offering: lots of crates offering various features (though i think it's still lacking in some areas, e.g. i'm not aware of any crate offering VSLAM out of the box), a great build tool / package manager (cargo), a platform to discover those crates (crates.io). what i haven't seen a lot yet are examples of robots built using rust running on (embedded) linux (think Raspberry Pi). and i'm not sure if there's any easy integration with messaging middlewares (though Zenoh is written in Rust and it's actually one of the supported DDS backends in ROS 2 since a while) and tooling around that (like recording & replaying messages) or simulators (like gazebo)?