A Linux beginner. VMs or dual boot?

So the problem is, I can't get rid of windows since it's the dominant OS for gaming. In addition to that, I use it for game development as well as occasional video/photo editing (adobe products. Although I know that there are good alternatives available on Linux and if I wanted to, I could run them with Wine. But, I'd like to stick to adobe.). Needless to say, poly-booting multiple Linux distributions on the same machine sounds like a pain and it would take a longer time to boot from one to another given that I don't possess an SSD on my desktop machine. Now the reason I'm asking whether VMs can do the job is that I want to get the full experience of playing around with these distributions with a decent performance.