It only has to be able to rip music CDs, nothing else.
EDIT: Thx to @account_93@lemm.ee, @zod000@lemmy.ml, @scrubbles@lemmy.world, @aard@kyu.de, @GeraltvonNVIDIA@lemmy.ml, @Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com, @ByteWelder@feddit.nl, & @harsh3466@lemmy.ml 👍
In my experience shit just works in Linux. I own an 10+ year old external DVD-Drive and an newer external BD-Diskdrive. And both of em work flawless on Manjaro.
I have this OWC Mercury Pro, which I purchased after going through several cheap ones from amazon that kept dying on me. So far it’s been great. I’ve been using it to rip my cd & dvd collection. FWIW I’m running Fedora 41 and it works great.
Asus makes a slim 8x external DVD burner that rips CDs very well in Linux, comes with usb-c and usb-a (double connectors.)
One of those cheap 12-15$ AliExpress DVD R/RW USB C drives did the trick for me.