What would you suggest now? IVPN and mullvad used to be my go-to VPN providers but now that they both removed port forwarding I really don't know what to use.
I don't. Your ISP can hardly see anything you do online. Almost all websites are encrypted with HTTPS and if you are concerned about them seeing what domains you visit you can just change your dns server to quad9 or something else privacy respecting. A more valid usecase for VPN is preventing websites from tracking you IP address, downloading "Linux ISO's" or bypassing geographical blocks and for that I used mullvad but I am looking for something else now that they blocked port forwarding.
I rarely use the containers. Instead I prefer to seperate activities with different versions of firefox. I use Firefox ESR for normal browsing, Firefox for VPN browsing and Firefox Dev/Chromium for school. I also use a different color scheme on each firefox so I do not confuse them.
Not really. I used it for ~2 years but after a conversation on irc 5 months ago I switched back to Firefox and I have been mostly using it ever since. Search I trust slightly more and the VPN I dont really trust at all. Also it is better to support firefox and other smaller browser engines so chromium does not have a monopoly on web browser engines. Now that I don't use mobile as much and I don't really care about syncing I am happy with firefox. I originally started using brave because I used an iPad a lot and brave was the only free ios browser with ad block back then. The history with injecting referrals into urls and all the crypto crap makes me not trust it much anymore.
I used it on an Apple M1 Macbook Air 2020. https://arvanta.net/alpine/install-alpine-m1/ It worked mostly ok but I ended up going back to archlinux on that machine because the graphics driver was not packaged for alpine.
You might not need to, If you just want a distro you can install with your dotfiles and programs maybe a setup script which you can run after installing a distro is a better idea.
I use a fifine microphone which mostly works ok. I used to use NoiseTorch when I had a keyboard with clickies but it was more trouble than it was worth (probably zoom linux client's fault not NoiseTorch though).
I use sway wm with the foot terminal emulator. If you do not like manual tiling I have heard good things about river wm.