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.

After years of running a rolling distro (gentoo) I had come to realize that it was a bit of a distinction without a difference. Major updates simply felt less planned than a ‘traditional’ distro.

You still get “major releases” with rolling distros. They’re just smaller. Updating to new plasma/gnome versions, new glibc, etc.

Wow, this question takes me back to like the 00’s when laptops had battery life measured in minutes.

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.

Gonna make provisioning servers a lot more interesting…

Man, what’s up with Linux filesystem developers?

Compared to checks notes reinstalling an entirely different distro???

Jesus the cli phobia here is ridiculous.

While learning about all the Linux stuff I came to know about desktops, and I felt like, if I wanted to ever use a different one, yes, it could be installed the hard way, but I would rather have a distro that can be installed with my desired desktop by default, and the one that got my attention was KDE.

‘sudo apt install kde-full’ is “the hard way”?

Yeah - that’s why I was careful to say “most”. Stay away from weird “immutable” shit.

The “multiple distros thing” is often the most confusing aspect of the Linux ecosystem. But don’t sweat it too much - they’re more similar than different. Generally speaking you can do all the same things with most any distro.

The most user-facing differences are in the installer, default UI settings, and how applications are installed. A lot of it is simply preference.

All of the ones you mentioned are “fine”.

But if you want to “distro hop” (something that I consider to be a mostly pointless activity) then you need a way to preserve your home directory between installs. It’s where all of your settings are kept. The two ways of doing that are typically a) have a backup somewhere (recommended regardless) and b) put /home on a separate disk partition (more advanced - easily Googleable though).

They appear daunting, but the simple edits you’re talking about aren’t very difficult to do. I’ve used kdenlive for simple things and it’s pretty easy to learn. Your may just take a little Google for the first run through.

Sorry, I mean “it simply doesn’t work”.