Yeah the problem is I don’t have a card reader on my main desktop and I tried a bunch of my old passwords and none worked so I was just going to reimage it.

Interesting, I did not know that…

Yeah I’m thinking my SD card is failing… I know it’s slow but I tried to do a fresh install in recovery 7 hours ago and it’s still initialing the “noob” installer.

Supposedly I was thinking to small, I was thinking like trying to use nmap to discover all ip addresses on my lan or load vim to practice vim motions (I get the idea but I’m still too slow put in alot of commands cause I’m like ok… Up 10 lines, ok, up is… Look on cheat sheet… I… then number of lines… That was 10…look on cheat sheet… Oh just enter 10…it didn’t work… Figure out because it’s not ingrained in my head the time looking at a cheat sheet is making commands time out).

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?

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)

Would I be able to run a gui remotely from a Windows pc? I have extra monitors(yes kinda a tech hoarder) but don’t have space to setup another full setup. It has raspbian installed(or the pi-hole version they used to have), will have to guess on the password but I think I remember it.

My initial plan was to remotely access it via ssh with putty on the windows system.

Long story, my shield decided to have its network die. I reset it. I replaced the network cable and changed ethernet ports on router but nothing would work (wasn’t even getting the lights on the ports). I didn’t know if it was the shield or the router so I found the pi and plugged it in. Network immediately worked so I know it’s the shield. I was able to find an old Asus nexus Google TV box which “solved” the shield and was thinking of using the pi for something other than just sitting in a box under a bunch of wires.

That may be my only choice. Was trying to avoid it as I don’t want to lose everything on my computer and dual booting would be difficult as I don’t have a huge hard drive.

I “tried” Linux but never got it usable. I initially decided to run a vm on virtualbox to experiment. I tried Debian, arch, kali, Ubuntu and all ended up having an input lag of 1-2 seconds. Windows the system was fine. But I found my self unable to do basic tasks it was no bad. I don’t mean I didn’t know a command or unwilling to find a foss software equivalent, I mean it took several tries to get the mouse over the X to close a program due to input lag.

OK I then decided to try a docker container with Linux. It got so messed up if I open docker desktop it displays an error that the container was unable to start, if you close the error to edit settings or create a new container it closes docker desktop, no way to fix it.

I was able to get a wsl command line working but all I found it able to do is add 5 steps to everything due to having to start the command, start wsl, log on, elevate permissions etc.