It depends a bit what couldn’t afford means in your context, but I would recommend paying for your own (cheap) domain. That way you can move between email providers if for example Google suddenly bundles AI in its plan and becomes too expensive. The whole package would come to ca. 30€/year here in Norway.

Debian Sid, the unstable rolling release branch of Debian. It has the worst of both Debian and Arch!

On a more serious note, it allows me to have a somewhat standard Debian system with bleeding edge tooling.