MS and other corps love MIT and related licenses because they can just take the code and basically do whatever with it in their projects, so it makes sense for them to promote it. Generally speaking, they won’t touch GPL/AGPL as it would force them to distribute their source.

I believe it was a very intentional choice to use a permissive license for Rust. If they hadn’t, it would not have been as popular as it is today, nor would it have big money behind it. https://rustfoundation.org/members

This is basically the holy grail for finding how to do things or troubleshooting once you have the basics down: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page

A large amount of information is transferrable to other distros, particularly if they use systemd.

I would also spend some time getting comfortable with the command line. There are a million tutorials, guides, and free courses on this topic. Find a shell and terminal emulator you like. I’m using Fish and Kitty these days.

Going against the grain, maybe consider EndeavourOS for a distro? https://endeavouros.com/

In this scenario, the thumbnails are going to be generated when you browse the directory. Probably what network filesystem you’re using. Alternately, maybe there is a maximum file size on previews? I know dolphin has that option.

I would use the native version. For something like this, it makes sense that it should have less restricted/sandboxed access to the underlying system.