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.