I’ve been using Ubuntu for years with my figures. Though, if someone isn’t sure and feel they need more space for the time being 48GB or even 64GB is a good bet.
Another thing I never mentioned (but should had) is the idea of making a backup that you can boot from to continue work. If it can fit on a USB stick, then you can continue to perform work if for some reason the primary media no longer functions and you kept work off of it. That’s actually a really good point I would love to append — the capability to become portable with use of a monolithic kernel.
That is why in scenarios where a RAID setup isn’t in anyone’s future, at the very least doing work on a USB stick can save the trouble of trying to recover most recent work if using a common area as a vault after work is no longer necessary to persist on the portable media.