For a handful of projects work and hobby alike I use Debian. However, when you deal with embedded systems (e.g. ARM SoC) you normally don’t have the installer CD or even the disk drive. You end up creating a filesystem, compiling the kernel. Well, pretty much the usual way it goes.
The process can be somehow lengthy if done by hand using debootstrap and multistrap and especially mind-blowing if you are a total newbie. (Alas, I’m already no n00b here. Getting older, heh)
The worst part of it is that you not only need to create a root filesystem for debian, but set it up in a more or less sane way, e.g. set the default password, ssh keys… The usual thing.
In the Big Enterprise ™ we can see tools like vagrant creating us a base box in the VM and chef or puppet actually setting the system up. While we can use, say chef or chef-solo on an armhf board (why not?) we still have to make sure we have some base image it will set things up on, right?