Dual booting Linux and macOS on ARM64 (M3) without affecting existing macOS?

So, I'm looking at starting to transition over to a Linux system on my MacBook Air which uses an M3 chip. On the hard drive of the computer I have more than 20 GB left of storage, and I've heard Linux is pretty lightweight so dual booting is actually more feasible than, say, macOS+Windows. Is it possible to install some Linux distro without affecting anything on my macOS disk, so that the only difference is that at power-on I get a choice between macOS and Ubuntu and if I choose macOS it would be exactly the same as it is right now? How do I do that? (For context, I currently have Sonoma 14.3 installed). What is the best distro for this? Are there popular distros that can run natively on ARM systems without requiring installation via Asahi?

Is a better option to download Linux on a different hard drive or USB stick and run it from there so I don't have to deal with partitioning?