wsl --install installs Ubuntu by default. If I had to use WSL, I’d try this first too.

The hard part for me was dynamic scope, which I found it was explained nicely in The Common Lisp Condition System: Beyond Exception Handling with Control Flow Mechanisms. Since then I have begun to feel that dynamic scope in Bash is a feature, not limitation.

Cachy, Endeavour, Garuda, etc should be fine.

Since you are a coder, I suppose you using CLI should be fine. However, there are many other alternatives, which is fast and even based on Arch Linux.

In the 90s, QBasic (IDE) and Edit didn’t work on Slackware. So, I tried Pico, Vim, and Emacs. Now, I still use Emacs.

With some certain distros, it is easy.

With CachyOS and Mint, it is very easy.

Remark: I disabled secure boot.