I prefer to boot a live USB first to get a better feel
This one. Easier setup, cleanup’s a breeze, no muss, no fuss.
As others have said - Live USB.
Set up a USB stick with Ventoy and you can throw a bunch of distros on there so you can trial all of them without needing to flash a new USB.
Just put the ISOs on the Ventoy flash drive and boot into Ventoy.
It’s a good way to try it out. You can also use a live usb or cd where you can boot Linux into memory and it won’t affect your current installation.
Probably, but there’s also DistroSea
My preference is „bare metal” approach, then I really know if everything is working as it should, so I had a separate drive for Linux installation at the beginning and got to my other drives by just mounting them as NTFS.
But, finally I am at the point of no return for some time now, the old Windows drive is not even inside of my PC and the other drives are ext4 already.
For a quick check Live CDs/USBs are totally fine but not fully representative.
I took a similar approach. I just used a different drive. And actually reinsertrd the drive that had windows on it so I could wipe it and use it as extra storage.
Virtualbox first, to get the initial feel. Then live CD/USB to see how the distro works with your computer. It’s a good way to find out if your distro of choice recognizes the hardware that it needs to. That way, if something is wrong, you can address it before committing to installing the OS.