ASL and other apps on a Pi 4

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Question about Raspberry Pi and AllStar nodes: I recently got a Pi 4B and am considering trying to set up an AllStar node just for the fun of it. However, it looks like the recommendation is to use the specific preconfigured distribution rather than just using a standard Raspbian distribution and installing things yourself. Problem is, I also want to play around with FlightAware, and it too wants to push you to their PiAware distribution. Are these things just so complicated to install and run without a custom prebuilt distribution, or is installing and running all this on a regular Raspbian distribution possible? Or do people just buy multiple Pi’s to make them custom one-off applications rather than running multiple services on one device like I’m wanting to do?

So my primary question is, can you run the ASL apps and the FlightAware apps simultaneously on the same Pi? What about Retropie or some gaming apps as well? Or is it really just better to create single-purpose Pi’s?

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I don’t really know about any of those other applications, however the ASL3 Pi Appliance is architected to own/control the underlying operating system. I would not recommend installing other applications that expect to do the same thing - which is presumably what the PiAware image does. Overall, it’s a better user and support experience.

That said, assuming you’re willing to do the work, you can install the ASL3 packages on any Debian 12-based image. You won’t have some of the niceties that the Pi Appliance provides, but installing core Asterisk/app_rpt, asl3-menu, allmon3, etc. is straightforward.