If you just want to get familiar with Linux and are running Windows 10 or later, why not try installing a distribution on the Windows Subsystem for Linux? It's better than a virtual machine since it runs without containment so it makes sharing files between Windows and Linux easy, and it provides you with the full command-line Linux experience while taking advantage of the accessibility that you are already used to on Windows. You won't get the native Linux graphical user interface desktop experience, but experience of using Linux on the desktop is not required anywhere.

Another cheap option that will provide you with the full accessible Linux desktop experience, which is sadly not feasible at the moment due to the chip shortage, is to buy a Raspberry Pi and use it as a Linux box. Since the Raspberry Pi runs primarily on SD cards, installing Linux on it is just a matter of downloading a disk image, flashing it on the card using your PC, and then booting the Pi with it. The official Raspberry Pi OS is as accessible as it gets, even asking you whether you wish to enable Orca during installation, and Firefox works perfectly on it, while other distributions such as Alpine and Gentoo make it easy to perform a remote headless installation.

I personally use Alpine Linux on MacOS with Docker and Raspberry Pi OS on a Raspberry Pi 400. Whenever I need to debug a booting problem on the Raspberry Pi I connect it to my Mac using a cheap HDMI to USB dongle and use VOCR to read from its physical display connection. It is also possible to debug kernel problems using an old school serial connection, but I don't think you'll be needing that for a while.

I have a few questions regarding this topic myself. I am totally blind, I use Windows computers and Mac computers regularly with screen readers. NVDA, Jose, and Apple voiceover I’m very familiar and comfortable with using all my laptops.
I would like to know what are some advantages of using Linux?
Where is a good place to start learning Lennox?
I have been curious about setting up a raspberry pie for the last couple of years to do different tasks. I know that I have to do some programming to get the things that I want it to do to work. I’ve watched videos on YouTube on how to program raspberry pi. Are those steps similar to what you would use on Linux?
Thank you very much. If anybody could recommend any resources for a Linux newbie to start it would be greatly appreciated.
Hope all are well.

I've been coding for 25years and never needed anything outside the shell. Be it hobby work or professional stuff, connecting via a serial port or through ssh, a GUI on linux has never appealed.

Also, I have red Orca's keyboard shortcuts, and even some tutorials on Youtube. But, I am strugling with navigating through lot of of user interface elements. Any nice article or tutorial for this? I don't suppose NVDA would run there?

Quickly because I am busy, but I can highly recommend https://linuxmint.com/. There's no problems, it just simply works, comes pre-installed with Orca. The installer also has Orca pre-installed, so you can do the entire install totally blind without assistance. Just get to that start screen, press Ctrl+Alt+T and type "orca", and you'll be able to go through the install yourself there.

Unsure what issues you were having with Orca, but there is none on my end. Yep, logging in to remote machines is totally fine. I do it probably 40 times every day on multiple machines and servers.

as a linux user, i am a bit biased towards what distro to use because i personally prefercentos, though for a beginner wanting/needing accessibility i would suggest looking towards ubintu. you can download and try out a live cd of the distro, which also includes the orca screen reader within the desktop environment (starting and stopping with the windows+s keys, or windows+alt+s? i can't exactly remember)

i would also suggest a headless machine, which is super convenient if you only run strictly terminal like i do. that way, you only need your screen reader and an ssh client and you're pretty much off to the races. you may find some difficulty in navigating menus in things that use ncurses, but there isn't a ton of terminal specific applications that use menus (unless you really like to use nmcli or something). going the headless route may also bring a few hurdles when installing; at least, i required about 5 minutes of sighted assistance during the centos 7 install process because there's no screen reader with the gui or included at all. wasn't too difficult though because it was literally "hey click the next button, don't bother with configuring i can do that after it's installed just get me past the prompts please" for the most part.

all & all, if you're brand new to the linux world i suggest grabbing the latest ubuntu live disk and giving it a shot. orca does kinda suck and there's quite a bit of a learning curve (at least, i had a difficult time just navigating around the xfce desktop environment so i stick to console only)

if you have any questions, i can do my best to assist though it isn't too difficult if you have a basic understanding of how to use a computer in general.