"Now if you prefer [insert window manager of your choice]"

I've gone deep down that hole. XMonad, fairly custom, custom keyboard layout, custom emacs... occasional light gaming is all I do now that Windows has an advantage for me personally. YMMV.

One nice thing about Ubuntu still being based on Debian is that it's easy to install enough to satisfy Steam and all the games, since Ubuntu is what they target, while leaving the Ubuntu UI off and doing whatever you want underneath.

>One nice thing about Ubuntu still being based on Debian is that it's easy to install enough to satisfy Steam and all the games, since Ubuntu is what they target, while leaving the Ubuntu UI off and doing whatever you want underneath.

On my Arch system, Steam works perfectly well for me.

Even in Ubuntu 13.04, Steam installs a bunch of Ubuntu 12.04 stuff instead of relying on native libraries. So the Debian base doesn't matter much for compatibility. It's more a matter of packaging it with everything it needs to run on any distro.

Steam works perfectly under OpenSUSE as well. You don't need Ubuntu at all.

The big problem with this strategy is that disk I/O in a Linux VM under Win7 seems to be about 1/10th of the speed that it is under native Linux.

I run my ubuntu VM off of a SSD. My VM performance is (unbenchmarked) seemingly faster than many laptops and netbooks running Ubuntu. It's blazing fast performance that I believe is better than most native Linux installs on spinning drives.

I don't have I/O benchmarks to back that up, just anecdotes from my usage, but I'd be shocked to find that my ubuntu VM was 10% of native performance.

If you give access to real drive/partition it is native.

This is likely going to be my setup as well - technically running Windows 7, with a Linux VM up whenever I don't need all my system resources for gaming.