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 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.