The solution that worked pretty well for me at a Windows shop was two monitors, a Linux workstation, and a Windows VM in kvm. The VM stayed up on one of the sc

The solution that worked pretty well for me at a Windows shop was two monitors, a Linux workstation, and a Windows VM in kvm. The VM stayed up on one of the screens most of the time. This was ~10 years ago and I don't use a windows VM anymore but I was pleasantly surprised within the last year or two to find that Windows 8/10 will happily boot from its own media under kvm (for troubleshooting/restore purposes in my case), so you probably don't even have to reinstall Windows. Just qemu-img convert the disk to qcow or similar to save space. Desktop quality is highly flexible and entirely what you make of it. I'm happy enough with default Ubuntu unity or whatever they ship this year. Xfce if you want incredibly snappy response, better than any other common modern desktop. Most workflows are browser-based or terminal-based at this point anyway; I use very little desktop software (games are by far the majority of non-browser use and I am pretty happy with Steam's selection) any more. Your mileage may vary.