As a general purpose USB (which not only works great for daily use as a thumb drive but also works with no issues as Linux Live or persistent USB) I can recommend the Sandisk Ultra line. I had them everywhere from 16GB to 128GB. They never let me down. The housing might look like it's made from flimsy plastic but it's surprising sturdy.

A second drive I'm currently preparing for use as a persistent Linux drive is the Samsung portable SSD T7. It's nice and sturdy and the USB C to USB C interface allows me to easily run it on my Laptop without using up any of my precious USB A ports.

Yes, getting a better flash drive will get you better performance. Make sure you get a good USB 3 drive, and plug it into a USB 3 port. I’ve always had good experiences with SanDisk drives. Avoid the off brand drives. They’re often really bad or even fake.

There are some fancy ones with SSD-features like wear leveling, though i don't know which.

But why not a NVME USB enclosure?

Thumbdrive as main disk does work, but once i trashed a SD-card-as-home with compiling something, i gave up on the idea.

Do you have a spare SATA SSD? This is my go-to USB cable for connecting SATA SSDs via USB: https://a.co/d/dQ5QXR1. Works well on Raspberry Pi and it'd work well on a thin client too.

Note that the Wyse systems don't have much CPU power as they're designed to be used as thin clients (where nothing runs on the system other than remote desktop connecting to a server somewhere). That's why they have so little space - they were never designed to run a full OS.

SanDisk usb-keys work.

You really want to use the thing for read-only, though, if you can:

the writes it takes to kill some portion of a filesystem, vs the writes you get before corrupting things, on a USB driver, don't line-up.

Use NVMe as your 1st-choice for storage ( future purchases, obviously ), the fastest you can get, and be stunned by how much faster the same motherboard is, with superfast OS storage..

I'd stick /home, not /usr, on the USB.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

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I wonder if you can replace the storage element with something bigger. It might be a data drive or an M.2 drive. You could replace either with a bigger device.

I'm curious, the current flash drive you are using... does it allow paging files? I would figure flash media would be marked portable to the OS and not allow page files to be used.