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?
If you can find a microSD adapter, you have plenty of options. The “server” version of raspberry pi OS is a CLI OS based on Debian. If you use the raspberry pi flash tool, you can even set up the SSH login details before you flash it so you don’t need to hook up a monitor or keyboard to the pi.
Out of curiosity, I discovered there were other isos on the SD card I could install but the “noob” installer took literally hours to initialize, is that a sign the SD card is going bad?
It’s possible, but there are plenty of reasons an SD card can be slow. Not necessarily going bad.