I never had printers behave well under windows either though

You can definitely dual boot but you will probably need to shrink your windows partition or install it on a separate drive. Linux can read and write in NTFS format but it shouldn't be installed on it.

Definitely through USB. I recommend checking out Ventoy for creating USB install media, you can just chuck a bunch of live ISO images of different distros on there to try them and find what you like.

Correct