Author here. The bandwidth usage was high with many open connections, I fixed that quickly by using LZW encoding instead of sending uncompressed data. I think you are referring to this thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6t8gpq/timegif...
Author here, my bad. There was a DoS attack against this a while ago and I set too strict limits after that. Didn't expect it to hit Hacker News again. Should be fine now.
You are right, vim is not required. SSH I misremembered, didn't install that. The rsync version on macOS is quite old (2006!) and didn't support all the options I wanted to use.
I have not found a way yet to reliably put the device to sleep from keyboard. With a shortcut it wakes immediately, maybe because it registers the letting go of the keys as a wakeup signal.
Since this is for work my choice was between a MacBook or Windows-based laptop. Personally I wouldn't even have considered using anything else than Linux.