Going Lean

Since the first appearance of the Raspberry Pi more than 10 years ago, many hardware vendors have followed the idea of an inexpensive computing powerhouse on a small board. Companies such as Asus, Odroid, and Pine64 all jumped on the single-board computer (SBC) bandwagon, naturally increasing the number of operating systems (OSs) for these boards. Most of the OSs are based on the ARM architecture and can now be found in various sectors of home computing and industrial applications.

The Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS is a very useful desktop replacement, and many Linux distributions offer their own offshoots for the Raspberry Pi. For example, LibreELEC is a media center, and gamers will enjoy RetroPie and Batocera. The lean, minimalistic DietPi is a great choice for small servers, older Raspberry Pis, and virtual machines. Thanks to carefully considered scripts, the set up is a convenient process.

From Debian

DietPi first entered the digital world in 2014. The purist operating system was initially built on Raspbian (today's Raspberry Pi OS). It now builds directly on Debian and supports numerous SBCs and architectures. In addition to x86_64, ARMv6, ARMv7, AArch64, and RISC-V, the project supports virtual machines such as VMware/ESXi, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Parallels, UTM, and Proxmox. Besides images for virtual machines, you will find images for the Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Pine64, Radxa, Allo, Asus, NanoPi, Orange Pi, and the VisionFive RISC-V board [1].

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