this is excellent, i've been thinking about this as well recently. my goal has been to create a small device/appliance using raspberry pi. i tried out lots of operating systems: raspbian, ubuntu-mate, ubuntu core, windows iot, fedora, etc. i needed a lightweight x windows environment, a decent package manager, and modern linux kernel, overall none of these really seemed to match my needs. basically raspbian was too heavyweight, it was a desktop environment with way too many applications like libre office, etc that i just didn't need. ubuntu core required the use of snaps which are based on docker, i'm hosting an electron app so that's just overkill, i'm thinking in terms of preserving memory, too since there's only 1g on the rpi 3 model b so everything has to be optimized. windows iot requires a windows license, a definite non-starter for me. i even looked at chromium and android, but those didn't seem to be a good match because i want to host a golang service and i don't have a touchscreen. i even looked at fuchsia, but that seems too experimental.

i even considered doing my own os, but ultimately my goal is to build an appliance so that would be a major distraction. dietpi seems good, i will probably pursue that, but thanks for writing the article.