DietPi – Lightweight justice for your SBC | Hacker News Reader

DietPi – Lightweight justice for your SBC

dietpi.com

53 pointsjanandonly23 comments

I have DietPi running on a Raspberry pi Zero W (armv6l), which is a system that's supported by barely any distros nowadays.

It was easy to preseed, has the absolute bare minimum amount of processes running, and is altogether a fantastic distro. Highly recommended.

For what it's worth, plain Debian runs fine on those as well, most easily via https://raspi.debian.net/tested-images/

If anyone wants to contribute, this is the easiest grokkable code base of all time: the software install and uninstall process for every single software item is managed by the same single humongous shell script.

If that sounds terrible, take a look at it yourself - it is incredibly legible

https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi/blob/master/dietpi/dietpi...

For those who are curious. I have to admit, this is never something I'd have done myself, but I struggle to justify a more complex approach.

A source of truth is always welcomed in my book

Rather than using DietPi for my devices around my home I use Balena (balena.io), which seems to cover the same area. In addition it has a dashboard so I can see the status of the devices too. Balena is Docker based. No connection with Balena, just a happy user.

I use the x86 version on an old low-power celeron-based Dell Micro as a print server that sits alongside my laser printer. It's great. Enjoyable TUI interface for setup. Also makes for a nice underlying OS for pi-hole setups.

I enjoy the command line plenty but when I just want small single-purpose low-power devices to have an OS, DietPi makes it a breeze

ive been using dietpi for a long time, its been a really nice option for headless pi. I can't say its faster or better then a raspbian headless but i like how its been put together.

For the more recent stuff I've done on RPi 4b boxes (8gb), I've mostly just run Ubuntu Server on them, and then had most things running via Docker (compose). I'm guessing this is a much lighter base to run from, could be interesting.

Any comments on if/how well it runs on an x86 VM?

Has someone used DietPi long enough to verify the promised performance gains and longer memory card lifetime?

Not sure about the memory card lifetime, but it saved my Pi 1 Model B from the long transition from "why did I buy this" to "I might as well trash this, it's too slow".

Found it last year in a drawer and couldn't get anything modern working on it. A friend mentioned DietPi when I was complaining about it and now its been powering AdGuard for my entire apartment ever since. I run heavier things like Home Assistant and Plex on beefier setups, but it's nice finally finding a use for it after all these years

It's been running it on a Pi3 for my garage door controller for well over 3 years (probably closer to 4 now) and I don't think I've logged into it more than once since I set it up. Really no complaints here.

I have been running it on a couple PI Zero W’s for three years running nodejs controlling LEDs. Probably not too write heavy, but no issues.

I don't have baseline for comparison - running HomeAssistant for a few months on RPi 4b, currently 34 days uptime and no issues in sight, htop processes list fits in half of the page. Can't comment on SD card lifetime because I'm booting off SSD - I actually haven't had SD card die ever before... Probably luck

DietPi creates a RAM disk for storing logs to reduce SD card writes.

I'm looking at the comparison page, and they say PI's OS hasn't been built since 2021. I don't know where they get that date from, but the raspberrypi.com website says their latest release is from May 2023.

How does this compare to just running Alpine Linux?

Edit: I don’t recall exact numbers, but it looks like DietPi uses more disk space. The RAM usage looks impressive, but I’m not sure how similar/different it is, compared to Alpine.

It's Debian based so allows you to run glibc binaries.

I would just use yocto with containers instead.

I think NixOS might be the ideal system for this, but I'm not sure how to get around the issue of other people not wanting to learn it. People seem to not like learning new complex tech unless they chose it themselves.

I almost think skipping the headless install and dealing with the full ultra-hacky-DIYer process might be worth it.

It's really easy to flash a stock image, log in with a keyboard and mouse, copy a config from a flash drive, and rebuild, even if you don't already know the details, and it's usually pretty trivial to add a package that already exists, or create one that is just python.

I don't know how to handle remote admin though. Nothing seems as well documented as Ansible.

NixOS is awesome, I love it and use it even personally, the only problem its implementation for Arm based wasn’t great last time I tested it (sbc jetson nano) and reliability was critical since that operating system used to power a flying drone, ended up using yocto+containers instead, but that was 2ish years ago so maybe it’s better now.

And I agree with the learning curve, I leaned it for personal use first, but even when I tried to suggest using it for that SBC -before knowing it will not work properly-, I got a big push back from other engineers about it, because they never used it!

Does DietPi use systemd ?

I just upgraded one of my dietpi systems and it has switched to systemd. So far for my light duty it's stayed up.

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