Docker is the quickest, we recommend this for all POV

Some customers might insist on installers (political or technical reasons) when they go to production

The best choice is whatever suits your business needs the most.  Same for distro, use whatever is most aligned to your business (however note that RHEL might have moved to Podman.  I have seen instances where customers used Podman with little/no change to our Agent, but as this is not officially supported so that responsibility would need to be considered)

HTH