Man I’ve read that few months ago and had already forgotten most of it. Reminds me of adjusting the SWAP partition of two VMs though.

Just I’d enable ssh asap so you don’t have to connect all that stuff permanently. There’s a way to modify the boot SD card so Raspian comes up with Wi-Fi/network and ssh enabled iirc, so you don’t need to connect anything but a power cable

You can certainly install some Linux on it (Raspian is Linux) and then just tinker around. Check how much RAM it actually has and see which apps work on it.