Many of the newer distros have the option of burning the OS image to a flash drive, which I understand is significantly faster than running from an optical disk. Have you tried that yet?
Also, I was under the opinion that pretty much everyone understood that running programs off of an optical disc would be slow in comparison to installing onto a hard drive and operating from there. However yes, running off of a bootable drive allows one to familiarize oneself with the OS/programs on the disc and become comfortable with using them, without changing the configuration of the machine you are using it on or affecting its programs, data, or files.
With no chance of unwittingly changing the makeup of your machine or damaging anything, why not take a chance?
I’ve done the flash drive thing - still not that impressed. But the thing is what is a noob going to really get done either way? They’ll probably fire up a browser, fire up libreoffice, if they know a few command line commands then they’ll start a terminal. Then what? In the end the only thing that really matters is kicking windoze (or apple for that matter) to the curb and going all in on linux. Anything else is going to result in “Yeah I tried linux (for like a day) but couldn’t make sense of it” - or words to that effect.
I guess what I’m saying is that you’re either all in or you’re not in the game at all.
You can build a dual boot machine or throw linux on an old piece of hardware and use that but at the end of the day you either have to go all in or you’re not in the game. In my opinion.