Shouldn’t it be Satans little Helper? Because cat?

But that’s a useless use of cat.

Sozialdemokraten!

Can you alaborate on the sysctl tweaks for low-latency audio? I have a carbon gen4 as well.

Only if it glows blue.

Nextcloud supports webdav, which you can just mount as a virtual filesystem either with GVFS or some KIO slave. AFAIR there is a fuse implementation as well.

For your single application a Windows VM may be suitable. Maybe even on some remote system in your company cloud. Single application forwarding is a long established technique.

For IrfanView itself I don’t know the capabilities, so can’t advise on it.