SkavarSharraddas

Make sure to disable Windows hybrid sleep. If your system isn’t shutdown properly and you access the Windows partition from another system that can destroy data.

If you just want to keep the data on the Windows partition and usually don’t need to run Windows, I’d remove the Windows drive and keep it somewhere safe, and get another SSD for Linux. That way, the two systems are completely separate and can do nothing to each other.

Swap is mostly a crutch for too little RAM, if the system doesn’t have enough the best solution would be an upgrade. If that’s not possible, consider zram-swap, or if you have to, swap to an SSD (that will reduce its lifespan, though maybe not in a relevant manner). If you swap to an old HDD you won’t have much fun using the system.

Audiobooks have a simple workaround if you can find a version of the book in text format to download, just index that.

Calibre can create a full text index to search through everything (well, for files that actually contain the text, and it needs a lot of space).

Nothing, some people just dislike the slow pace of its development or some design decisions and fork it (and in the process remove or break less used functionality, like Podcini can’t read any feeds on my old Android 7 phone).

So what’s the open source alternative you found? Sounds like it needs more advertising.