… virtual machines where you only have to select which accompanying image of Arch / Tumbleweed / Ubuntu / Fedora you want to try.
In addition, the combination of a very stable base system (say, Debian or SuSE Leap) with a fast-moving, bleeading edge virtualized system (say, SuSE Tumbleweed, Arch or Guix) on top can be surprisingly useful. And because small virtual machines, when not running, are nothing else than files on your computer, you can have many versions of them, alter things, try stuff out, then delete it and go back to the tidy original state.
Someone else brought up Virt Manager here, which is my preferred; if you’ve ever used VirtualBox, you’ll probably be fine on Virt Manager. I like Virt Manager for using GTK3, as I’m in XFCE. I wouldn’t be surprised if both applications have similar settings, as they’re both LibVirt front ends, it seems.
Also, DistroBox, while a different sort of thing, is great for the sort of thing OP mentioned in that last paragraph. I usually just use command line, but there seems to be an unofficial GUI out there.