Depending on the walls, generally at least in my country walls are made of clay bricks, so any hammer drill will work, but if you want to drill too close to the ceiling, or the ceiling you will need something better.
I ended up buying a rotary hammer because of this, holes on the floor (doorstoppers), ceiling, or walls right close to the ceiling was impossible with the cheap hammer drill, along with a good SDS+ drill bit feels like butter now.
I had a F-91W for years, I still have it and it still works, but like you I moved to an automatic Seiko 5 (the smallest I could find as my wrist is quite thin), for two reasons I wanted something more good looking, and I didn't want to worry about batteries (although they last years)
I did install it too on my 6.1 and found the System app trying to connect to several cloudfront IPs, cant find any kind of extra info, did you find the same?
I do have polkit installed, there is an use flag "systemd" that I have disabled and so far I had no problems, it keeps systemd away from my system, and everything works.
Wait does it mean other init systems did not have dependency based boot? I have always been a Gentoo user so always used OpenRC, if that's the case it explains why I never understood why systemd was so "revolutionary".
I do find it harder to configure and understand than OpenRC, after I edit some configurations I can just restart the service and it's working, with systemd I have to run more than one command and they are not intuitive at all.
Since I work both on Windows and Linux here are my tools.
IntelliJ as an IDE, mainly Java/Android but I use it too for any other supported language (shell scripts, python, whatever, if there is a plugin I use it), sometimes even for some single files, since I have it open nearly all the time.
Notepad++ for any quick edits on Windows.
vim for quick Linux edits (mostly stuff that needs root)
Edit: Sometimes I need a hex editor, for that i use Bless.
Since I develop 99% on Java I would recommend anything along the lines of Spring Boot, Dropwizard or Wildfly Swarm. With Dropwizard I can't say much since I only played with it a little, on the other hand having developed projects with Spring Boot and Swarm I can say both do the job really well, both seem pretty much future proof (even though many claim JEE is dead).
Personally I would go with Swarm since I feel there is less work configuring it. With the added advantage of being used to develop in JEE Environments.
I find it surprising that some people complain about performance, here even with two large Java projects I only get that kind of CPU % when building indexes (only after importing a project or dependency adjustments) and its only for a few minutes.