The Raspberry Pi is at the vanguard of the market for SBCs (short for ‘single board computers,’ often known as ‘computer boards’ or simply’miniPCs’). When it comes to operating systems, Raspberry Pi OS is the most popular one.

However, SBCs can run a wide range of operating systems (both GNU/Linux versions and other OSs) to meet a variety of requirements. One of these requirements is for ultralight systems that consume extremely little CPU and RAM resources.

An ultralight generalist for your SBCs and PCs

DietPi is the most popular distro in this category, with 58 percent less RAM and 42 percent less disk consumption than Raspberry Pi OS Lite. This is accomplished by optimizations such as the default usage of RAMlog, which saves power by avoiding continual writing of log files to the hard drive (it saves them to RAM and writes them all at once during the shutdown process).

It boasts of providing an entire catalog of popular programs adapted to your specific configuration right out of the box, including optimized versions of apps like Apace Server and Kodi Media Center.

And now, this distribution has new version 8.3 for download, which includes not only various bug patches from the previous version (affecting both system components and software in the repositories) but also improvements to the existing software…

…such as the addition of the PHP Composer package manager, the addition of motionEye (a web interface for managing webcams using the Motion protocol), or the revision of the DietPi-Drive Manager assistant to increase the possibilities when managing shared resources via NFS or Samba (for example, allowing multiple NFS exports to be mounted from the same server).

In any event, the biggest novelty of this new version is likely its newly released first support for containerization, which is the first step toward using DietPi as a platform to produce Docker or LXC containers.

Remember that, despite its name, DietPi is compatible with a wide number of SBCs (including the Odroid, NanoPi, Pinebook, ROCKPro64, PINE, ZeroPi, OrangePi, ASUS Tinker, and others) as well as PCs (virtualized or not). Its website has a long-range of benchmarks that compare its performance on various devices.

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