I don’t expect much but I found an old pi I bought probably 2016(may of been 2017). It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem. It still works but wanted to somehow convert it to a regular distro(it’s based on a micro-SD and I don’t have any more microsd readers). I wanted to set it up as a basic system I could ssh into a terminal. Not expecting anything fancy or even graphic based. A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible? Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?
Yes you can do loads with your Raspberry Pi. Certainly you can install ARM based linux distros onto it, but with an older model you’re best using a Pi specific linux distro.
The official Raspberry Pi OS is linux and is compatible with all Raspberry Pi models - there is a universal 32bit version and a 64bit version for newer models 3+.
There is also Dietpi which tries to be more lightweight and optimised.
You can image either distro onto an SD card and run it on the Pi. If you connect the pi to your network you can run it headless and access it via SSH on your PC.
However, if you main aim is to learn and play with Linux, then it is worth considering alternatives. For example, you could install VirtualBox on your Windows PC, and create a virtual PC to run any X86 linux distro you’d like on it. That can include small systems with command line only or a full desktop environment of your choice. That would likely give you much higher performance and options than a 10 year old raspberry pi can offer.
The Pi is good if you want an always on server device to play with Linux on. The Virtual machine route is good if you want a more powerful system to play with occasionally when you feel like it.
Yeah, I tried virtual box on my main system and kept running into odd problems with every distro. For example Debian had a full second of input lag, with 2 cores of a 13th Gen i5 and 16 gb of ram dedicated to it. Kali would install and I ejected the “installation medium” aka the iso and reboot and the virtual box couldn’t see any bootable drive. I tried fedora and it kept freezing on installing(sat at like 35% for over 3 hours)