CJ01
Tiny Core and DietPi are hard to compare, as they are totally different concepts:
- Tiny Core is a completely independent own Linux distribution that really brings not much more than the Linux kernel, busybox which brings a purged down set of usual Linux commands you would expect within the shell, and it’s own supporting commands, a bid similar perhaps to the ones DietPi offers (/boot/dietpi/ files). If you check the size of /boot, you see that the Linux kernel itself + bootloader + custom kernel addition and the whole bunch of DietPi scripts does not take much space. All DietPi scripts is about 1.3M. Busybox is ~2M AFAIK. For this Tiny Core is extremely tiny and can run completely inside RAM. DietPi in comparison just runs it’s own scripts inside ram disk: /DietPi/. What really takes space is hardware drivers and software blobs that you will find on common Linux systems.
- DietPi is based on Debian/Raspbian, thus brings the whole (although very purged down to the system minimum) Debian APT and systemd system. Thus you are able to do all core system, networking and software configurations and installation as you expect from a Debian (or Ubuntu) system. Most importantly the official Debian/Raspbian APT repository is used, thus you can install the extremely wide range of software packages from there, which makes DietPi very flexible from the comfortable end user perspective, which just wants to have its forum, sync- and share server, web page or media streaming server etc. at home.
- On Tiny Core, there is a (compared) very limited own maintained software repository, so you will find the most important things there but clearly you will often run into the situation that a specific software title you expect on Linux systems will be not available and you need to install manually from source code. I somehow can’t open the repo browser, but here you get an idea: http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:applications. And for sure, as the Linux kernel does not natively support much hardware, e.g. GPU support for SBCs, network dongles, audio and all such needs to be installed manually as well.
- If you really have a specific use case for your device, and you know that the needed software and hardware drivers are available with Tiny Core, then it is an extremely lightweight and fast. But if you used other Linux distributions before, don’t expect it to behave too similar and many stuff surely needs to be applied/installed manually.