I remember being able to create a persistent drive using Rufus and Linux Mint (Not the Debian edition though) , Rufus has a slider for creating a persistent drive when burning the iso, pretty sure you can find some guide online
Not sure about the security, but recently I’ve tried runit on a very old laptop with HDD and it took waaay much less to fully boot up than a clean Arch32 with systemd
I thought a WM would be lighter on resources that’s why I picked it up instead of XFCE, it’s doing it’s job well I guess
Been using the fluxbox 32bit variant for a while, pretty good and solid, lightweight on resources (the device runs on 1GB of ram and still serves me well enough) only drawback is outdated packages (cuz debian AND 32bit), also I’ve noticed the MX team has done some cool stuff (like I found telegram-desktop (kinda active package) in the MX repo there is no official binary for 32bit Linux)
Mint works pretty well as a persistent flash drive distro, the packages are a bit outdated though if you’re going to do a lot of programming
I’ve tried ranger for some while, pretty neat, but I haven’t tried other terminal file mangers tho
Running rootless xorg recently got my Plasma to black screen after a min of launching sometimes, couldn’t switch to a tty (I could press the power button and it worked so ig only the GPU driver crashed or something) the problem most likely only aroused when I adjusted sddm settings from Plasma’s, which created a new sddm configuration file, removed rootless xorg config and it seems to have fixed it