Mint works pretty well as a persistent flash drive distro, the packages are a bit outdated though if you’re going to do a lot of programming
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Honestly I'd go with something that supports booting in secure boot mode like fedora or Ubuntu(direct derivatives maybe). And yes, install to am external drive if you plan on having persistence.
Alpine works great off a usb, I run sway and quite a few other bits off it on a run-from-ram/encrypted config.