As a casual user of Nerves, it's the easiest way of getting Elixir code running on a clean RPi system. I don't want to install a stripped down Linux myself, then install Erlang and Elixir, then transfer the built code every time and restart the board, or write scripts to do that. That would be a waste of my time when I just want to develop my app.

With Nerves I could just write code and run `mix firmware && ./upload.sh` (the upload script was generated by Nerves).