docs: Add in a readme that covers the overview of what Mendel is
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+# What is Mendel Linux?
+
+Mendel Linux is a lightweight derivative of Debian Linux that runs on a number
+of Coral development boards, including the Coral EdgeTPU.
+
+If you're looking to get started with any of the Coral boards, please take a
+look at the [Coral Website](https://coral.withgoogle.com) for more information.
+
+If you're looking to get started developing, patching, or building Mendel for
+your own uses, please read our [Getting Started
+documentation](https://coral.googlesource.com/docs/+/refs/heads/master/GettingStarted.md).
+
+Patches, bugreports, and kudos are welcome!
+
+## Why another distribution?
+
+To support Coral's hardware, we needed to build a version of Debian that
+produced initial bootable eMMC images and supported our specific peripherals.
+Ideally, we'd have liked to use the Debian name, but that wasn't feasable for a
+host of reasons.
+
+Suffice it to say, Mendel is considered to be a lightweight "derivative" of the
+upstream Debian distribution, and we even use upstream Debian's binary packages
+in the project to maintain compatibility and keep up to date with security
+fixes.
+
+## How do I get started?
+
+Development in Mendel is unlike writing software for Android or Chrome OS --
+those systems are focused on building whole operating system images. Instead,
+you write your software like you would for any standard Linux system and package
+it up for delivery to the board via the usual apt repository system.
+
+To build an image from our tooling for one of our boards, check out [Getting
+Started
+documentation](https://coral.googlesource.com/docs/+/refs/heads/master/GettingStarted.md)
+Note: we generally discourage this, as we put a great deal of effort into making
+sure our releases run well on the boards we target. Mendel is a proper Linux
+distribution: we work with packages, not images, and any image should be
+possible to upgrade to the latest release with a simple `apt-get dist-upgrade`
+without requiring a reboot (modulo kernel and bootloader updates, obviously).
+
+## What do we support?
+
+Mendel currently only supports the Coral EdgeTPU Dev Board (also known as
+enterprise, or phanbell).
+
+For development, our build system only currently supports Linux systems.
+Unfortunately, this is due to various factors out of our control, so it is
+unlikely that Windows machines will ever be supported. Mac machines may be
+supported in the future, but currently is not a high priority for the team.
