The advice I would give is to use Balena etcher or terminal dd to create a bootable Linux OS on a USB stick. Shut down your computer and hold down the option key while powering up. Two boot options will show up, MacOS and the Linux boot. Booting to Linux directly will eliminate the VM problems that are possible. Don’t mess with your boot drive at all and everything should be fine for MacOS. A reboot will automatically result in MacOS booting up. Probably Mint is an easy place to start, Fedora is more streamlined, Manjaro is a decent introduction to the Arch Linux universe, I use Arch and though it isn’t always the easiest system to use, I like the rolling update architecture of the platform. Ubuntu and Debian seem more like Windows to me, and I have never preferred Windows for anything. Please don’t hesitate to ask even the most fundamental questions. I made a lot of mistakes and some people in the forums just assume you know things that people new to the space don’t know. I hope it goes well!