Raspberry Pi Foundation has always understood a few people want a lightweight OS for the Raspberry Pi. These versions usually omit the visual desktop and windowing system to be “lite”, but retain everything else we think of as Linux.
Furkan Tokaç, a Turkish Raspberry Pi enthusiast, has created an extreme lightweight collection of the RPi boot loaders, a Linux kernel, and the QT window system resulting in a configuration that cold boots in less than 2 seconds!
His post includes the most concise review of the RPi boot process ever.