If you just want to donate to a private tracker and limit the paper trail, see if they accept XMR (Monero). If they do, buy off an exchange, send to your XMR wallet and then pay with that. Monero is designed to be untraceable so only the person who initiates the transaction has the key to decrypt the details for it… meaning people can’t snoop on your transactions. https://www.getmonero.org/get-started/what-is-monero/

For what it’s worth I am a developer who is fluent in multiple languages and I definitely agree. Even for things that I could do myself I’ll often ask ChatGPT to do because at worst, it produces something a new hire would do and I’m very used to code review. At best, it introduces me to new tools or ways of doing things. It feels like I’ve got a personal intern now.

A good lightweight distro is Arch since you can customize it to exactly what you need. If you go that way and have trouble with installation, ArchFi can help a little.

But as others have said, what you actually want is docker. All of your concerns with it stem from your lack of experience using it. When your only tool is a hammer, it’s easy to see every problem as a nail.