content: I have to use Windows at work, but I use Linux at home.  No one "has to use Windows at work".  Quitting and getting a better job is an option.  🤓  I think finding the right distro is one of the things people struggle with though.   I don't get it.  You can make any major distro do exactly what you want, it just takes a bit longer on some than others.  Ubuntu is now the most popular option (including preinstalled on Linux laptops, and on VPS servers), so that or Mint is usually the best choice to start.  Then you can decide if you wanna switch to something Arch-based, RedHad-based, etc. Have a shared /home partition (which also contains anything you wanna share, like /root, backups of /etc, things that by default go under /var, etc).  You can then easily jump distros on the system root partition (or use bootable SSD USB, one per distro).  If you use ZFS for the shared partition you can even boot other OSes.  You can also experiment with other distros in chroot (my favorite for that being Gentoo).