I use a Asus ZenDrive V1M

Asus makes a slim 8x external DVD burner that rips CDs very well in Linux, comes with usb-c and usb-a (double connectors.)

Just get a drive from any old notebook of the last 15 years or so someone wants to throw out, and buy a USB to SATA slim cable.

Just CDs? Pretty much any of them

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.

A couple of years ago I bought the pioneer BDR-XD07UHD. I just plug it in and it works great. It works flawlessly with makemkv and eac for ripping. I’ve used it on three PCs across Ubuntu, fedora, and endeavoros. No issues.

Amazon doesn’t sell this one anymore, it appears there’s a new version. Might be worth checking that one out.

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.

One of those cheap 12-15$ AliExpress DVD R/RW USB C drives did the trick for me.