I’m also nervous about using an OS I’m not familiar with for business purposes right away.
Install the latest version of VMware Player (17.5) on your current OS, then install linux distros on virtual machines to figure things out first.
If you settle on any you like, make a full disk image backup, before repartitioning to install linux as a dual boot setup and try it on hardware that way.
Keep the Windows partition around, if nothing else just for games or apps that don’t work on linux, or as your backup working profession setup.
edit: some will recommend VirtualBox instead, but for me (on Windows at least) it always resizes on startup incorrectly and obscures part of the desktop, so I have to manually resize on every VM boot. VMware does it properly each time for me without issues.