Or do like me and install to a 200gb partition, then carve down the window partition to create a third partition to keep new files, repeat untill you have 5 partitions on your drive. After that, find that you haven’t touched windows in forever and wipe it now that everything is spread between an unethical amount of partitions.

At least I can give them funny names

I’d suggest the hands on approach personally. It may take some time to get up though.

You can install a distro onto a USB stick and boot from it to play around and see if you like it.

Here’s a quick tutorial:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/latest/preparing-boot-media/

And separately the distro I’d reccomemd using:
https://fedoraproject.org/spins/kde/

After you create the live CD you should be able to keep it plugged in and boot to using this method from howtogeek:
https://www.howtogeek.com/129815/beginner-geek-how-to-change-the-boot-order-in-your-computers-bios/

To be clear if you stop there Linux will not installed, you won’t lose any data, and you can just unplug the USB stick to allow windows to boot up when you restart.

One note, sinceit’s installed to a USB stick it’ll be a bit slower than if you installed it on your PC. Still though, it’ll be the same idea.

Here’s a full guide on how to install it:

https://www.howtogeek.com/693588/how-to-install-linux/