I prefer to boot a live USB first to get a better feel
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.
This - but I’d take it a step further and use a small-ish USB 3.2 SSD with Ventoy instead. That way, your live Linux experience isn’t kneecapped by having to load programs off a slow USB stick. In a pinch you can use a SATA SSD with a USB-SATA adapter too, that way you can cram a ton of ISOs on there and go to town.
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.
That or live cd (well, most likely live usb nowadays)
Live USB boot IMO, you remove the virtualization performance overhead.