I’d avoid super short USB drives if you can as they tend just to be SD cards in disguise.

If possible for dB stuff I would recommend using actual drives as lots of reads and writes will very quickly wear out most removable storage devices.

Currently that it just shuts down hard when waking from sleep. I suspect its something to do with my monitor but haven’t spent the time to work out why.

Yeah I made the switch and finally moved my daily driver of to kubuntu and it’s been surprisingly painless. Only thing I’ve really struggled with is finding a music player I like.