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Is an old raspberry pi useful for anything based on Linux? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 week ago by vrek@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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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?

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[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 4 points 1 week ago

X2goserver certainly is an option there. not too complicated to set up, or VNC is another option. As always there will be a bit of screen lag when sharing a gui over network.

and yeah as someone else pointed out there is also the option to run x applications from an ssh client if you enable it. now I will admit I don't think there's a huge amount of utility, more pointing out though it's most likely you are either drastically underestimating the power of a raspberry pi, or maybe overestimating the resource overhead of linux distributions.

The linux world doesn't quite have the mysterious resource usage creep at nearly the same scale as windows a slim but still with gui setup can still run in under 100 mb of ram.

Leaning on the extreme low end assuming you were a generation behind... the raspberry pi 2b+ came out in 2015 with 1 gb of ram. So yeah, while I can't really name any gui applications that might be desirable to use in that way. IE it could be a decent web browser station, or kodi media player if hooked up to a TV etc... I would imagine lag from using a gui application accross would easilly remove any advantage that you'd get over... well just running the probably existing version for the windows PC that you are likely remoting in from.