I would say to just try it out and see how it is! The live USB works nicely and you can decide you don’t like a distro and move on rapidly. There are also tools out there that let you load up multiple distros on the USB at once, and then pick which one to use when you boot up.

I went through my own struggles with dual booting Linux some time ago. If you search on Lemmy, you can find those embarrassing posts. It was my fault, I got confident and messed with ‘grub’ in all the wrong ways, before cutting my losses early and reverting everything because I had other commitments to deal with.

The good thing though is that it’s totally possible to put Windows back 100% the way it was before, even after messing up as badly as I did (I couldn’t boot into either operating system because the machine couldn’t find the boot entry). Once you’re ready to replace windows with Linux (or dual boot etc.), make a good backup with something like Macrium Reflect and you should be safe to go for it. I highly doubt you’ll make the mistakes I did, the story is to say that you can mess up and be just fine!

As for your use case:

• affinity programs aren’t on Linux from what I remember, you might want to experiment and see if you can run it with Wine or if you have an alternative (ex. Dual boot, different programs)
• Not sure about Davinci, comments suggest that it runs ok on Linux. I like KdenLive

As for what people recommended, and what I’m planning to try soon

• Kubuntu (if you want Ubuntu that looks similar to windows)
• Fedora (what I tried last time)
• Linux Mint