About a year ago, I trialed both Proton Mail and Tuta mail. Proton mail worked out better for my needs, but YMMV. 

One nice thing about switching providers is that it gives you the opportunity to rid yourself of years of built-up cruft and spam.

I use Ventoy to boot everything but macOS. Those installers need their own partitions on the SSD.

Do yourself a favor and skip the USB drive - they are ridiculously slow compared to a compact external SSD. I found a cheap m.2 enclosure on Amazon and put an old SSD in it and the speed difference is breathtaking.

My SSD has a bunch of Linux distros grouped into folders along with Windows 10 & 11, every macOS from 10.13 to present, along with Rescuezilla, Hiren’s and a few others I can’t remember at the moment.

Rescuezilla was my #1 go-to during my days of distro hopping. Makes it super easy to try out a distro on bare metal instead of a VM.