this day and age always go for at least a 8 gig and usb 3.0 if your mobo supports usb 3.0.

Yes but only because that's the smallest size you can get.
- most isos are below 2GB
- of the few very that are larger, almost all are below 4G

Wouldn't it be great to still have some of those old 2G and 4G sticks?

NO not because it's the smallest size you can get, cause we both know you can still get the 2 and 4 gig keys. now no it wouldn't be nice to have the 4 gig keys and under.

The "almost" is the reason I recommend 8G.
Of the over 30 isos I have on my data partition, a few 1G, 2G would work with about 1/3 or more of the isos, the rest all, but 4 or 5, will fit on a 4GB. The 4 or 5 that won't fit are from main stream linux distros that one may likely try.

You guys sound like you're disagreeing with someone who said one should not have USB sticks larger than 4G.
But I don't see anyone in this thread who said that?

I said "4 gb" because I still have 2 of them. Each one is a live USB with Manjaro KDE October ISO and Unbuntu's Septembers Iso. Both are mainstream and ran great with 24 gigs of ram. Op's question was for what is good size live usb stick to test drive some linux distros. Why waste a larger thumb for something like this.

Someone mentioned a "Persistent USB" for that 8 or better, but it wasn't the question. Microcenter still had 4gb thumbs as of a couple months ago at the register though they are harder to get in general.

If you have them old usb 2.0 or even just 2gb usb drives you should keep them handy. For example I forget which off the top of my head, but to soft mod an og xbox your thumbdrive will have to meet one of those criteria.

actually it's like nothing of the kind.

Don't try the CentOS 7 "Everything" ISO then, it is about 10 GB (the 8 version is somewhat smaller, but still almost 7 GB).

We are getting a bit sidetracked I think.

I agree that one can easily use a "live to usb creator" to get almost every distro on a 4G and one should be able to test the OS. The live images are compressed so that even with some minimal persistence you get a small footprint. Any real install to a usb will require one to look at the minimum hardware requirements of the distro for hard drive space.

Is that the best choice today?? Well, guess it depends on what you have for money, supply chain and such.

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Luckily I could only find some 16GB USB sticks around five dollars at my local walmart so I grabbed two of them