I just bought the same computer and put an SSD in the internal slot. It’s been fine so far but it hasn’t been long enough to give any advice.

I’ve hosted Plex for years using external HDDs without issue. There is a bit of a delay when starting a stream, but nothing I can’t live with.

While the criticism may be valid, it doesn’t make sense to someone new to Linux.

It’s easy to switch to Ubuntu from Windows, and it’s easier to switch from Ubuntu to another distro.

identify

find DIR -executable

copy

find DIR -executable -exec cp {} TARGETDIR \;