Instead of a distro or machine for each combination, it's also possible to use a configuration file in the build directory. Your application recipe just says "require my-app-config.inc" and then you can provide the contents of that file when preparing the build. Makes things easy to produce but harder to reproduce...

An interesting approach, didn't occur to me, thanks for the hint.

The penalty for building things with unneeded features usually isn't that big, so it might be worth it if you have systems with and without screen to build them all with "x11" or "wayland" in their distro features. Trick is to adjust the image recipe so that the headless machine doesn't install all the graphic stuff (usually you'll have to take a look at how some packagegroups get included and change that).

In this particular case I can use DISTRO_FEATURES in my recipe and nicely use one image recipe to produce multiple images, this is however not possible with e.g. kernel modues, as such variable does not exist.

Wifi and bluetooth can be compiled as kernel modules and loaded on demand.

Yes, this would work as well. Though some would argue that out of security reasons it's better to reduce the attack surface and not even have kernel modules to be loaded in the first place if they are not needed at all.

Aleksandar