If you mean for picking which distro you like, assuming you don’t want something unique like qubes or nixos the only thing that really matters is DE and package manager, everything else you can install/uninstall as you see fit (if you really want to you can change the DE yourself too)

Every Debian based distro is the same operating system underneath with different stuff installed, every redhat based system is the same story

That said certain distros come with a lot more pre installed that you probably want (for example the zip command)

Terminal stuff. I change from bash to fish and love fish. Although I believe it’s not posix compliant or something

I would recommend against Manjaro for messing with the Arch packages & other weird decisions that anger that community, Fedora for not having LTS kernels, & sadly base Debian for desktop with the apps often being stable but way out of date.

Most distros operate about the same as far as software & will as a result likely feel more or less the same. The biggest exceptions are how GuixOS & NixOS do declarative, stateless config symlinking in config/executables from the store. If you wanna get into dev, these will force you into the right mindset & are worth checking eut, but will definitely be too cumbersome for someone that isn’t committing the steeper learning curve & ‘just wants to run things’.

Try doing everything you would normally do with a computer and see how you would do it on linux.

Do you have a couple of machines or is your pc pretty good. Get into containerisation VMS, docker start running some self hosted services.