I had several drives in my PC, so I wiped a small one and just installed a few different distros and figured out what I liked. I ended up sticking with nobara with KDE.

Archcraft and Arco.

https://neon.kde.org/

KDE is the best desktop environment, period. Why not go with a stable OS base but enjoy all the current updates of your desktop, app suite? Introduction: KDE Neon

1. It doesn't really matter much which distro you choose.
2. Use flatpaks - flatpaks sandbox your apps more than traditional packages. As a side effect, the package manager of the distro won't matter anymore.
3. There are thousand of distros, stick to a popular one.
4. Install packages on distrobox instead of directly onto your system if you use the terminal. Stay as close to the base image as possible. If you want to have access to all packages, install arch/endeavouros on distrobox and use the aur. If a package is not on aur, it's not published yet. With distrobox there's no reason to switch to another distribution because of package availability.
5. Use a distro with which you can roll back to a previous state easily. If things go downhill, youcan always fall back. There are many distros that provide a very easy out of the box experience for that. If you can't fall back easily, ignore the distro or be prepared for the worst case
6. Arch is for advanced people because you may set up your system as you like. There are many great distros that choose the base packages for you. You will have a great experience on most big distros. Most of them use GNOME. GNOME is great. KDE is awesome. Tough decision. Watch youtube vidoes about both. Install the other one in a VM to check it out. You may use an immutable distro like fedora silverblue/kinoite. You can switch back and forth by rebasing to the respective desktop environment.

Following is a good source for anyone looking into desktops https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop/ they focus on an educated distro choice.

Read the arch wiki whenever you want to do something or want to know something. https://wiki.archlinux.org/ you want to know more abiut piewire? aw! You want to know about GNOME? KDE? Type !aw KDE into ddg, qwant or brave. Read the respecting documentation of your distro. Follow them on mastodon. Register to the forum. Join a matrix community.

Watch great channels like "the linux experiment" on peertube. Yes peertube, why should you watch it on youtube if it's on peertube?

Use Archlinux. Reason ? Because you will be able to say " I use Arch btw".

Btw, I use Arch.