You can use LiveUSB. If you want to try them with their installation processes, you can try them on VM (e.g. QEMU).
Using VM may not reflect real hardware, tho. For this, I'd suggest more than one laptop. If you don't have a spare, some cheap office surplus might help.
If you want to just use that one laptop, but don't want to burn out your disk drive when you try out different installations, you can always use external drives.