I'm looking to understand osgi and find it confusing that every tutorial requires eclipse or is developed using eclipse (which complicates my understanding)
Is it possible to work with equinox without eclipse and is there an example of how this can be done?
OSGi is a standard. Equinox is an implementation of this standard. As it is mentioned on Equinox homepage, equinox is even the reference implementation (http://www.eclipse.org/equinox/) :
The Equinox OSGi core framework implementation is used as the reference implementation and as such it implements all the required features of the latest OSGi core framework specification
As a consequence, yes it is possible to use other OSGi implementations : Apache Felix, ... (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi_Specification_Implementations ). If you choose Felix, you will no longer use Equinox. But both implements the OSGi specification : https://osgi.org/javadoc/osgi.core/7.0.0/
In addition, you must distinguish the OSGi implementation from the development environment you choose (IDE). Eclipse is an ambiguous term that fits both. Even if you choose Felix implementation, you can code in eclipse.
I think that if most of the samples you find are based on eclipse Equinox and developed in Eclipse, it the result of the fact that : - Equinox is the reference implementation of OSGi - Eclipse IDE includes many tools to develop OSGi application through the PDE (Plugin Development Environment : https://www.eclipse.org/pde/ )
In conclusion, I would say that Eclipse probably cumulate the best IDE & implementation to work with OSGi. As far as I can see, it's a good thing for you to follow eclipse based tutorials, just remember that equinox is an OSGi implementation that you could replace by another like Felix.