this is a pretty interesting approach. was it difficult to get it all setup and working?
I run all of my AB software in a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM, Workstation Pro 14, and it runs like a rocket compared to any of the other VMs ive made over the years with W7 or W10.
Especially if you already have VMs set up, not bad at all. I went with debian on my desktop and kubuntu on my laptop for the drivers. Of course, graphics offloading can be a bit of a problem for intel/nvidia laptops, but they just released a driver to handle that.
I chose Plasma as a desktop environment. It is light, stable, and functions really well and fits the work flow I was used to from windows. Windows key --> search to launch applications. In addition, It took all of 10 minutes to find the global shortcuts and set them up to what I was used to. Plus most of the KDE applications do really well.
As far as office, I still have MSOffice on a VM if I need it, but I have not used it in forever. GPU passthrough, USB passthrough and bridged networking are fine. No issues with passing an ethernet port directly through to the VM either. I used LibreOffice on windows anyway. I never made all that complex of documents. View-->User Interface-->Tabbed gives me a comfortable interface I'm used to. There are a few differences with how things like page numbers are implemented, but overall I prefer it to MSOffice because it doesn't quite have all the clutter right up front from so many features.
I get better performance in the VM, and I can update the VM whenever I'm ready. I've disabled updates and windows defender in gpedit. I also went and set the machine to performance mode and set the desktop to a solid color. I'm fine with all of this because it isn't connected to the internet, so when I'm doing other stuff, I can just set the VM to update.
I think that about covers the bases. Also, if you have 2 drives, one having enough space, you can use clonezilla to make a copy of the drive you run your OS from, install linux, try it out and see how it works for you. You should be able to get your VM's working in an hour with a bit of google-fu. Then, you can use clonezilla to restore it in a few minutes. I was trying out different distros on my laptop with a 512 SSD and 1TB SSD and it took less than 5 minutes to do a clone or restore.