Sure thing. Probably you'll (most people) want a Stable Release or Long Term Service distribution to start with instead of rolling releases or bleeding edge distributions. I threw myself into the deep end to learn faster but not everyone wants that. I'm willing to risk breaking things beyond repair to learn, and have done so lol. You know yourself so that's up to you.

I'll give you my personal shit list if you like:

Pop_OS! I view System76 as incompetent after unfortunately owning a laptop sold by them. Long story, bad developers. Big regret.

Canonical is pretty notoriously awful now. So avoid Ubuntu and IMO stuff downwind (forks) of them. People really like Mint however, you can decide for yourself.

RedHat - Fedora is also making worrying decisions lately. Sad because I really loved Fedora. Second best repository to Arch/AUR. Again you can look up their controversies and decide for yourself.

Manjaro is infamously incompetent. Some diehard defenders, I don't get it. Lots of needless breakage in updates and AUR incompatibility. I looked this up to make sure my opinion was still current. It still is.

My gold list:

I like Debian or OpenSUSE for stable releases.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for rolling release.

CachyOS for gaming optimisations and as a bleeding edge Arch fork. I also love Pacman and the Octopi repository front end using Paru.

Just wanted to mention, I do this for work apps, including Autodesk products (and a bunch of niche industry apps).

I have a base VM for Windows (really for a few different versions of windows, some applications are horrifically outdated but still needed), which has nothing installed but the bare necessities. None of the junk from the microsoft store, just a working set of drivers, including GPU for pass through. I block local network access for everything but access to a specific directory on my NAS (mounted proxmox-side so Windows doesnt see it as a network endpoint, just as a mounted drive).

I clone that image for each application I want to run independently.

Its been my method for a good few years now, aside from my work laptop its the only bit of windows I have. It also keeps a nice separation of my work stuff from my personal stuf.

I then boot the VM for whatever application I need, and off we go!

Highly recommended if you've got the setup to support it. And you don't have to go anywhere near the extent I do, I mention it just to share how far you can take an approach like this.

Hope it helps!