DietPi VS cage

DietPi is a lightweight Debian based Linux distribution for SBCs and server systems, with the option to install desktop environments, too. It ships as minimal image but allows to install complete and ready-to-use software stacks with a set of console based shell dialogs and scripts.

The source code is hosted on GitHub: https://github.com/MichaIng/DietPi

That's a good point, but the array of devices supported by the DietPi team is extensive: https://dietpi.com/

Before someone starts the usual yadda yadda about the RPi biger community, the OS not having long time support etc. I would repeat one more time: do not rely on board vendor supplied images; this is valid for pretty much all boards. Just go to Armbian or DietPi pages and you'll almost certainly find one or more images that work on your board and forums to discuss about them with very knowledgeable people.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

Those projects are well worth a contribution, as they don't have a giant like Broadcom behind them.

> bananapi do a lot of boards but their software story has been a bit poor

This is quite common with other board manufacturers too. I'd rather suggest to ignore completely their cobbled together distros, often also tainted by proprietary modifications, that become unmaintained in a few years, and see if they're among the many supported by Armbian or DietPi.

https://www.armbian.com/download/

https://dietpi.com/#download

The full release notes can be found at: https://dietpi.com/docs/releases/v8_25/

RPi OS = diet pi https://dietpi.com/ - initial config via text file - SDcard burning out partially mitigated as writes log files to ram then flushes to SDcard reducing write cycles

You could also try very minimalistic distros like TwisterUI or DietPi which are most known for their use in the RasprebbyPi / SBC computers but which also have editions for desktop / laptop.

You... might be able to, kind of, depending on your goal... So the thing is, if all you need is a single screen (or at least, I've not run this multi-monitor) and you're just working around drivers that don't support Xorg, you can just run cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), run xwayland on that, and run your real GUI on that. Of course, then you're skipping all the advantages of wayland except hardware/driver compatibility.

For "real" wayland, sibling comments are correct that you'd need a wayland compositor that reimplemented awesome.

> As a developer, I needed to port a custom Linux system to hardware that only has Wayland drivers and it was a giant pain. Wayland offers no advantage at all for that system but it broke a lot of functionality that relied on X in terms of window placement, etc.

FWIW, I've had decent luck running cage ( https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/ ), then on that xwayland, and then just ignoring wayland and running X clients. The result does still have some slight quirks, but it mostly works fine.

That did help me find https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage/wiki initially I'm here there's other going down that path. Thanks

I thought this was going to be some development news with Wayland compositing going further: https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/wayland/. Maybe it's because 29.1 was on my mind with the full Wayland client support being released.

If you want to just run one application in a modern way (yes, I'm assuming you agree that Wayland is desirable), then check out https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/.

You can run Wayland inside Xorg via cage[1] so you don't need to use a Wayland compositor.

[1]: https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

Just ran into cage, seems useful.

It's kiosk mode. Sometimes related to POS. You can use https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage (Wayland) for example.

Maybe starting with reimplementing something like this: https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage would be the easiest?