atzanteol

Yeah, containers can be quite useful for experimenting. Distrobox also if you need a more desktop-like experience.

You haven't said what errors you're seeing so it's difficult for anyone to provide any help... But I highly doubt rsync is the issue.

Seems unlikely. It would probably "not work at all" if a protocol mismatch was an issue. I'm willing to bet raync can fall back to older protocols.

What do you think a “lighter” distro looks like? Just uninstall stuff you don’t want.

How about “no”.

I love how you came up with a completely different scenario to answer “yes” to .

Doubt

You willing to go to jail then? Or just asking others to do so?

When you open and read files from a program the OS (kernel) will typically cache part or all of those files in memory. This is to speed up subsequent reads of that file since disk access is slow. “preload” seems to be making use of that feature. The kernel maintains this cache and evicts (unloads) things from it as needed. You don’t need to worry about it.