Dual booting is easy to do if you have a spare hard drive. Even just installing linux to a flash drive can at least give you a good idea of how it will run though it might be a bit slow. I wouldn’t recommend partitioning your hard drive to dual boot off of it for beginners though. You’ll risk data loss.

Funny enough, I’ve found Microsoft apps are the most inconsistent with this functionality

This brings back nightmares of reading the dark tower