Set aside a few weekends and mess around distro hopping. Think of it as a small scientific study. Use what you determine to be the most comfortable.

I suggest being clever in your partitioning keeping /home and any other areas personal to their own partition if not their own disks. If you want to experiment you lose nothing by wiping / and installing something else. Also, you should decide on an effective backup strategy.

Veracrypt. Make a file on your disk.

Don’t want a storage file?

Make 2 partitions, put veracrypt portable exe on the first normal storage partition. (fat32 is likely ideal here) Second partition formatted with veracrypt.