New technologies
Create a test environment and learn by doing.
The software we are looking at here is, by definition, bleeding edge. It may or not work for you, it may introduce instabilities to your system or it may conflict with existing software. On the other hand it may all work well and improve your life tremendously. There is no way of knowing without trying it. Some software may not be in your distro's repositories so you become the tester as well as installer. All of it comes with the standard open source guarantee: if it breaks your system you get your money back and you get to keep the pieces!
Installing experimental and untried software on your system is not the best of ideas unless you are comfortable with the risk of erasing and reinstalling your distro if things go awry. There are several other options:
You could test on a virtual machine. These are great for testing distros, but not so good for software that expects real graphics and storage hardware.
You could use another computer. This is a good idea, provided it is reasonably powerful. You may end up compiling some of this software from source, no fun on an old system. Old hardware won't give a representative experience of software such as Wayland either.
The best option is to dual boot your system, which we will discuss in more detail below.
Dual booting
Using dual boot is the safest yet most realistic of creating a test environment. Installing another distro alongside your standard environment means you can compare performance on an identical hardware. Most distro installers have an option to resize an existing distro to install alongside it. If you have a separate home partition, it's easy to share it between the two distros, so you can get on with whatever you need to do in either environment.
Which distro should you use? You could use the same distro as your main system - it's the one you know best and it makes comparisons more relevant. However, your distro may not have repositories with the new software so you may have to build more from source. If you are going to use a different distro, Arch Linux is a good choice. It has packages for just about everything and, very importantly when working on the bleeding edge, the Arch Linux wiki is an excellent source of documentation.
We mentioned extra repositories. While some of the cutting edge software is in the standard repositories of distros, they tend lean towards stability in their official packages. This means you often need to add an extra repository or two in order to install pre-built packages.
In some cases, there may not be a binary package available or you may want the very latest version. Then you will need to look at downloading the source and compiling it yourself. In some instances that means downloading a tarball, unpacking it and following the instructions in a Readme or Install file. With some software you will need to download the source from somewhere like GitHub. Downloading with git is straightforward and has the advantage that you can get updates without downloading the whole thing again with a simple git pull. The project will have a git address, like https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs.git. You download this with the git command (install the git package if the command is not available): git clone https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs.git
This creates a directory, cd into that and read the instructions for compiling. Repositories for git and similar do not usually have a configure script, so you generally need to run something like autoreconf first to build it, the Readme should explain the steps needed.
Once you have the source, by whatever means, follow the instructions to compile and install it. You will need the autotools and compiler installed, most distros have a metapackage called something like build-essential that installs everything you need to compile from source. The first step of the process checks that your system has all the dependencies needed to build the software. If it exits with an error about a library not being found, go into your package manager and install that library, then repeat the process.
There is a common gotcha in this process, when you get a complaint about libfoo not being installed when it is. This is because distros split libraries into two packages, the first containing the actual libraries while a separate package contains the header files for the libraries. These header files are not needed in normal use, the library doesn’t need them but the compiler does in order to build software that links to that library. These packages are normally called libfoo-dev on Debian/Ubuntu based system and libfoo-devel with RPM packages. You will need to Install the header package and that error will then go away. You can download, unpack and compile software as a normal user but installing it requires root privileges in order to copy files to system directories, so the final setp would be something like: sudo make install
Go on, try some of these new systems. Even if you decide they are not ready for you yet, you are guaranteed to learn a lot in the process, and that is never a bad thing.