quartz64-images VS DietPi

I spent some time last week tinkering with a SOQuartz board and ended up getting it working with a Pine-focused distro called Plebian[1].

Took awhile to land on it though. Before that I tried all of the distros on Pine64's "SOQuartz Software Releases"[2] page without any luck. The only one on that page that booted was the linked "Armbian Ubuntu Jammy with kernel 5.19.7" but it failed to boot again after an apt upgrade.

So there's at least one working OS, as of last week. But its definitely quite finicky and would probably need some work to build a proper device tree for any carrier board that's not the RPi CM4 Carrier Board.

[1] https://github.com/Plebian-Linux/quartz64-images

There is also Plebian Linux. It is a bleeding-edge bare-bones distro developed by one of the primary Quartz64 software hackers, CounterPillow. I used Plebian with a SOQuartz compute module; it worked well for my use case of testing out a Dual Gigabit Ethernet Base Board as a simple router.

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.