go for it! I was very upset with the direction MS took with Windows 10 and have now been running Windows in a VM with graphics passthrough since 2015, with no problems

the only real problem I had with setup was sound: emulated sound had buffering issues, as did USB

I would suggest buying a cheap soundcard, giving it to the VM and running a cable between its output and line-in on your host (which hopefully has hardware support, so the sound doesn't have to be touched by the CPU by the host system)

I'm salivating at the idea of being able to snapshot Windows before doing something quirky and then just being able to revert to a known good setup.

And btw. I wouldn't go for cheap for this build. I'm aiming for power and experience. Buying a 4K monitor and maybe VR headgear too.

yeah

be careful though, the hardware selection relies on trial and error quite a bit, devices have to support things like MSI interrupts, the board has to have proper ACS support, bios support has to be there, and so on

even picking things like graphics cards is a problem, some AMD cards support hot-plugging properly, others of the same generation don't

(and just because it's on the datasheet doesn't mean it works in practice :/)

I will be researching each component carefully and picking only items that have a proven trackrecord for this setup.

I was on the same boat. Made the switch, and this weekend I'm sadly going back. Ubuntu's UI is just a mangled mess full of bugs. I lost so much fighting against stupid UI choices that I realized I was wasting way more time than if I just stayed on -heck- win7

I don't know just how many people did Unity successfully prevent from switching to Linux!

With regards to usability and customizability, IMHO Unity seems to get worse with each release, so eg. now it no longer supports screenlets, and even the "Unity Tweak tool" no longer seems to work for several useful "tweaks".

But, I just don't get why do people assume it's either "plain" Unity or back to Windows. Have you ever tried Kubuntu? Or MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce flavours? I personally find KDE Plasma 5 the best DE ever, period - that is, once you invest those few minutes customizing it / fixing its few oddities here and there. Why don't you try it out?

In your opinion, what are the pain points of KDE?

For me, my biggest beef with Unity was a death from a thousand papercuts. EG: i wanted to open a file in a program and had to navigate to the location, and couldn't just copy the folder path as I did on Windows. Or when I wanted to Alt-Tab between two windows of the same program, I couldn't do it with Alt-Tab. To remove it, the forums told me to launch a program which then for some reason didn't open when I double clicked on it. And then I realized that Sublime Text was not longer called Sublime Text but Ubuntu somehow renamed it to the last file opened as admin, which was aparently a well known bug with Unity.

Then I read that the next version of Unity is a rewrite from scratch, with usually means many new fun bugs, and just said 'forget it'.

Now, is any of these DE simple to use and with well-thought defaults? I can try out a few ones (after all I will do a clean wipe of my desktop) but sadly don't have the time to test more than a few DEs.

I think KDE, MATE, Xfce and Cinnamon have all (mostly) sane defaults, and are simple enough to use, so it's mostly a matter of personal preference. I'd choose KDE though - I have used Xfce for years before, and it always felt somewhat limited.

Have you made a decision on the card yet? I really wanted to do this on my primary desktop and ended up using a secondary machine which I stream non-Linux games via Steam. But I hate running that second machine all the time.

It will depend on cash-on-hand at the end of next month and the available GFX at my local stores.

How do you achieve GFX and m2 passthrough on Ubuntu? VirtualBox?

There are a bunch of tutorials out there if you simply google it. I intend to use KVM.

I found this guide which seems fairly complete: https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/