Try Strawberry, Audacious, and Lollypop. There’s a lot of options, it just depends on what you’re looking for. I could give better suggestions if I knew what features are important to you.

This is optional and only happens if you check “Simulate Witcher 2 Save” when creating a new game I believe. Just choose no.

I did not realize this game is being made by KT Racing. Their WRC games were kind of yearly copy/pastes and the last one had around two months of updates before it was abandoned.

I won’t dismiss this game yet but it has me a bit worried.

Nope, no microtransactions, not F2P in that sense. Check out the patch notes: https://www.nomanssky.com/2024/02/no-mans-sky-omega-update/