There's Raspian Lite, which is pretty much exactly that. You can just add a window manager onto it.

will give it a try, i think raspbian is sort of targeted at the education market for students that need a full blown desktop computer for various things. the fact that it's running debian as a base is great. how does this differ from dietpi?

DietPi is smaller, but I'm not sure exactly what it's missing that Raspbian Lite has. I've looked into it before, but I don't remember the answer. They're both Debian-based.

This has a list of DietPi's pre-installed applications and the packages that it has available for installation: http://dietpi.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5#p5

i noticed dietpi has a great list about the various hardware sbc's and their performance ratings for things like file system storage, etc. time to also check out the asus tinker board or odroid c2.

that's something i considered, but i also wanted to take the opportunity to learn more about creating a tight knit distribution. i could see a lot of appliances coming out of these rpi like devices, there definitely needs to be a tight distribution purpose built for people who want to build appliances similar to mine. i've also always had this task burning in my list of things to do to do an lfs type project.

my device connects to any hdmi enabled tv and provides a digital scoreboard for sports, basically i'm running a chromium browser (via electron) and autostarting that when the device starts. the device is then controlled by an ios app. i ended up using ubuntu-mate, but i don't think i even need gnome, maybe something along the lines of windowmaker, flux, or lightdm would do. i need to save microsd space so that i can have users upload media like images and video, and ubuntu mate really hogs up 4G and above which forces me to have to supply a larger microsd card which ups the total cost.

An in-between option might be to use https://github.com/drtyhlpr/rpi23-gen-image -- it generates a Debian distribution for you with (more or less) only the packages you specify.

The most recent image I built ended up being around 700MB, but I included some stuff you may not need, so you might be able to get that smaller.