Spin up some VMs. Most distros should work out of the box like that. Then you can see what you're up against.

When you find something you like, try a Live ISO, if possible. Look for any odd behavior from that when it's on bare metal. If all is good, back up your data, and go to town!

I'd take this opportunity to move /home too its own place. A volume on Btrfs sounds good.

I literally did something similar and wrote a long ass post yesterday : https://lemmy.world/post/37274818?scrollToComments=true

We have different goals, but one takeaway to try is to rip mint to shreds before installing over it, that way you might get the hang of installing something the way you might need to before needing to.

Also, try some things that aren't what you are sure you want just to see if you actually don't like them or to reinforce your confidence in what you want. If you're spinning things up and tearing them down, you lose nothing but time, but can learn new things.

Damn. I was about to go into whole detail about setups and realized how rusty I am. I've been on arch for about 7 years now and just been super happy with the rolling release. I haven't had to do an install since the last time I bought a laptop and I quit trying to get others on Linux.

But give it some thought. It's really not as hard as others make it seem. Honestly, once you get it installed and setup is probably the easiest. It's very stable. After bouncing around with other distros I'd always run into things that irked me.

Just follow the wiki and you're golden.

As far as your partitions, I use to create a data partition that was the bulk of the free data. Then cut a megabyte out 10 times to create ten partitions. Those will basically be placeholder partitions.

So for instance, I now have a 999 gig data partition and 10 placeholder partitions. When I'm ready to create a swap partition, I move 5 gigs (from the ass end of the data partition) to the 11th partition. Then I move 30 gigs or so to the 10th partition for my root arch partition. And so on. You could move 30 to 50 gigs to the 9th partition and drop Fedora there and then OpenSUSE to the 8th partition. This makes it easier to jump back and forth without reinstalling and reinstalling. And all the while you can keep customizing each distro until you just get comfortable with one that keeps you most interested. (Maybe even drop Debian in the 7th partition for more familiarity with other based distros).

I've quit creating home partitions because I would get conflicts between distros and I honestly don't know how people handle that. I just use my data partition for storage.

Get comfortable with the dd command for copying your ISO, and MAKE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU DO THE COMMANDS IN CORRECT ORDER with dd! Actually, don't get comfortable. I ALWAYS look up the correct order and don't even try to act like I remember.

I don't know if this is helping at all. It's late. I'm going to sleep.

Update:

So for your case, I would cut from partition 4. Create a logical partition (if that's still a thing). Make the first partition of logical partition your data partition. Then cut from that like explained above.

I really am glad if you want to distro hop, I have done it many times. Play around, really try to see what the developers intended. It is a learning curve.

But speaking from my own experience, I am not too technically gifted and I enjoyed trying new things but I kept coming back to Mint. I feel there is nothing wrong if you come back. It's like life, don't be scared of trying new things, try, but nothing wrong if you know what you like and come back to it, even if it is a bit boring.

But experiment, go mad, my point I wanted to make is the worst case is you have a nice distro to fall back to.

Resize your partition to free up some space for a new partition. You will have to shrink the filesystem and then the partition. Install Linux on the new partition. Once installed, you can mount the old drive and set it up to mount as /home

Then clean things up a bit.

Assuming you used LUKS, you will have to know your passphrase to mount the encrypted drive.

Once you have a /home separate from your boot partition, it is a lot easier to distro-hop.

Resizing is a bit risky though. If you can afford even a small SSD, installing to that and then mounting /home is safer.

Live USB with Ventoy. Load it up with a few distros and try them all.