Stripping my device down to the bare essentials

[kqlnut]

According to the user guide screen rotation is possible in SXMO. I don't know about the current status of SXMO on Arch, but if all is good on that side, I would try it out on an SD card and see how you like it. Apart from getting used to pacman instead of apt (pacman is really nice), there shouldn't be much bothering you coming from Debian/Mobian on the PinePhone. Alpine/PostmarketOS might be different in that regard although I've never tried it. gmusicbrowser is in the AUR, so you can easily build it from source on Arch (although it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore; might be not too hard to update it yourself though).