Just to add to the Linux stuff:
Ubuntu or distros like it are quite well supported by many of the astro applications around, probably better than the Fedora variants. Personally I use neither (Gentoo), but that's because I generally know what I'm doing (or fake it good enough
).
For the desktop, I've gone through a number of choices over the years - I've now settled on KDE/plasma as it seems to be well supported and has a clean interface (to me).
An easy way to dual boot and avoid a lot of issues with Windows or EFI, etc, is to put the OSes on separate hard disks and just use the BIOS bootloader to switch as required. Often there's an F-key to bring up boot choices, so you can default to one of them for most use, then just select when you want to switch over.