nextcloud provides apps for both calendars and lists, if you’re comfortable getting into self hosted services. of course, there are a number of other self-hosted apps that provide similar functionalities as well, but nextcloud is probably a good place to start
Check out Lychee. It’s designed for (semi) public photo galleries more like Flickr
I recently switched from Google Podcasts to Podcini (fork of Antennapod) and it’s great so far
NixOS
I love NixOS, but the documentation is terrible. Better documentation would go a long way to making it a more user-friendly platform.
I’d also check out poetry2nix if you’re a poetry fan and interested in building your package with nix. See https://www.tweag.io/blog/2020-08-12-poetry2nix/.
you should have no problem doing Python dev on nixos, it’s basically made for doing development environments like this without the need for containers. you should just be able to set up a nix shell for your project that contains python and all the necessary dependencies, and then enter the shell. then, you’ll have all the right dependencies installed for your project and still have access to any editors you have installed
it sounds like rpios is using wayfire now, which is probably quite lightweight and can run on any distro
I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.