Set aside a few weekends and mess around distro hopping. Think of it as a small scientific study. Use what you determine to be the most comfortable.

I suggest being clever in your partitioning keeping /home and any other areas personal to their own partition if not their own disks. If you want to experiment you lose nothing by wiping / and installing something else. Also, you should decide on an effective backup strategy.

I would not vote guilty on your jury.

As good as it would feel to support this sentiment, every one of these “antivax idiots” that catches covid gives the virus more generations to mutate. Creating a danger to us all.

👏👏

I would not just default to exfat because it is “newer,” it does have compatibility issues on non-windows systems. The implementations differ wildly.

Veracrypt. Make a file on your disk.

Don’t want a storage file?

Make 2 partitions, put veracrypt portable exe on the first normal storage partition. (fat32 is likely ideal here) Second partition formatted with veracrypt.

You asked a question and someone offered a suggestion you were not looking in the right place. Then you become incredulous at their suggestion and start asking a whole bunch of sarcastic questions implying relevancy.

How about you google you problem and figure it out? No one will help you with that attitude.

Do it. I waited for release but it was smooth as butter before. It has some edge case issues but on the whole it’s been better than staying on plasma 5.