There is easy way you can you do this.
Technically you can boot an ISO from grub - that is fairly straight forward
When it comes to retaining your settings, this poses a challenge - especially if you do not have your home on a separate partition.
You could however prepare yourself as laid out in the following topic - see it as a template which needs further work to be complete.
There is not - but you can replace dolphin with pcmanfm-qt and ark with lxqt-archiver - personal preference.