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?
Try DietPi (Debian based ARM distro). It has an excellent set of custom CLI tools. They’ve been around for over a decade and have an active community and release cadence.
They even support Raspberry Pi 1/2 (I started with Pi 3 though):
https://dietpi.com/#download
I’ll have to see if I have a way to flash a micro SD to do that
I believe you’ll need a reader of some sort if you want to get the Pi running and you can’t SSH into it in its current state.
SD card readers that plug into your USB port are still quite cheap, even if you have the misfortune of being in the US.