Noxious

An Alpine user, cool! What is it like to use it as your primary desktop OS? I have only played around with it on servers or in VMs and containers.

Paru > yay

On Arch I don’t need any, I just run paru without any options, which by default invokes a full Pacman update, as well as updating all AUR packages. But I have a system maintenance script, that, besides doing some other stuff that’s specific to my system, runs paru -Sc --noconfirm to clean the Pacman package cache, and delete unneeded cloned AUR Git repos and build artifacts.

Onze Menu

I think Avalonia is pretty great for C# cross-platform UI stuff. JetBrains Rider is the best C# IDE on Linux.

Finding anything FOSS with Spotify integration will be basically impossible. Clock You is a great clock/alarm app in general, of course no Spotify integration though. But you can choose custom music you have downloaded on your device.

OSS Document Scanner is great. It’s also available in the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid repository: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.akylas.documentscanner

Nothing about the program itself is subscription based. All of the normal features of an email client (that you would also find in Thunderbird) are available for free. You only need to pay if you want to use their services like Send later, read receipts or link tracking, because these requires backend servers and actually costs the money.

Thunderbird is the best IMO. Mailspring is also pretty good.

I’d say Nix requires some experience, so if you are new to Linux, definitely go with Flatpak. I believe Flatpak also provides stronger sandboxing.