KX Studio, I forgot about that one! LOL. One of my favorites. As a side note The KX Studio dev is one of the main devs on Pipewire. FaulxTX.
Yes check out the latest AVL you wont be disappointed. The only thing that I dont like about the new AVLinux is the theme. Its decent and usable but the cursor. Looks a little cheesy. LOL.

VM's I've used before just to do a quick look at something. But if I want to seriously look at distro I just install it. That way I get the full experience. Also up till a couple of years ago didn't have a machine with enough horsepower to run a proper VM. So I never really looked into getting a proper VM set up.