- something running regular Linux would be too heavy (though I don't know if that's really the case, especially if you only turn it on a few times a day on average for a little bit)

- adding the "OS" abstraction would presumably result in access to higher quality ecosystem of libraries than whatever is available on bare metal directly (as I assume some of those libraries depend on the "OS" for event handling etc.) - which was the complaint in the comment I was replying to

But like I said, I know very little about this area, so if any of this doesn't make sense, just ignore my comment :D