I'm going to test Fedora 25 on real hardware in a couple of weeks time.
Bit alarmed by your comment about resources. How bloated are these graphical distros is 8GB of RAM, 4 full CPU cores, an SSD and hardware accelerated graphics (Radeon 7800 3GB) are not enough?!
No its fine. You had enough resources dedicated to your vm. I'm looking for a chart where someone actually took the time test all this stuff.
EDIT: finally fucking found it!
tldr;
debian with XFCE used only 345 MiB of ram whilst Ubuntu with unity used 787 MiB of ram.
OP as long as you had allocated even 2 GiB of ram to the vm it should've been perfectly fine.
I've installed Fedora in a VM. Plans for new hardware didn't pan out. Anyway, VM has 8GB RAM, 4 cores, SSD, performance seems good.
Fedora is the most broken distro so far. I installed Chrome x64 and it won't even open. Just hangs and then closes. I tried Chromium too, via Software Manager, and it does the same thing.
The software manager has lots of duplicate entries. It has "Recommended Graphics Applications" twice, and "Recommended Productivity Applications" twice.
The UI, GNOME 3, is batshit. There are no window controls except close! How do you minimize a window?
I'm starting to think that Linux is hopeless on the desktop. My various Pi servers are all great, Debian via SSH, but desktop... It's just broken.
people [for some reason] tend to throw out lots of distros to new people, but overall Ubuntu is probably best. Mint is also a distro worth looking at. but esentially it comes down to finding what desktop environment suits you, and most distros will have a range to choose from. there are tons of resources on Youtube, like if you want to watch someone tour around various distos, and perhaps solve basic problems, i'd recommend Chris Were, AJ Reissig, and Don't call me Lenny for that. there are some other channels, but i find these gentlemen to be concise, or at least they tend not to go off on biased tangents as some others do.
if you just want to see what a particular DE looks like, Linux Scoop is a good resource for that.
I switched to KDE Plasma in Fedora and now Chrome opens fine. Plasma seems much nicer than GNOME in general.
Opened up settings and found a setting for the mouse wheel! Woo! Changed it from 3 lines to 10 lines... And Chrome was exactly the same as before. Completely ignores it.
I don't understand what the problem is here. I mean... Is Chrome on Linux just broken? How can anyone have put up with incredibly slow scrolling for this long?
It's a shame because it looks like there is now a reasonable way to to AVR development on Linux, with debug support. If it were not for the bloody mouse wheel not working properly I could switch!
I really think you should stick with trying it out a little longer. As a ground rule, you can do anything in linux, even make scrolling behave in chrome, it's just there are some (often) times not a handy GUI tool, or, you'll have to install the GUI tool separately. I remember a mouse theme that worked fine, except for in one program - chrome, as chrome called the root theme folder and not the user theme folder like every other thing on the pc. This was in Mint.
I eventually found this: http://www.nicknorton.net/mousewheel.sh
It works! Scroll speeds are now sane. Quite why the preference in KDE is broken but this works I don't know, but I have it working on Fedora with KDE Plasma now. Going to try a few other desktops just for kicks and to see where else it works.
Next task is to get a AVR toolchain working.
Okay, quick check of various desktops.
KDE - Seems smooth and high DPI scaling works well, or at least as well as Windows.
LXDE - Basic, fast but no scaling and ugly fonts.
Hawaii - Wouldn't even start.
MATE - No scaling.
GNOME - No scaling, seems to be heavily stripped down
GNOME Classic - makes XP look good
So KDE looks like the way to go, for anyone else wondering. It seems like the most stable too.
I personally like XCFE it is a clean desktop and runs pretty smoothly.
I have a quick question, I have been using Linux Mint (until my desktop bought the farm) for about 4 months, what advantage does KDE have over Cinnamon or Gnome in your opinion? I am currently running Centos in a virtual machine on my laptop. The reason I am using Centos is the only free distro like Red Hat (I am studying for Red Hat certification a possible job offer) I currently have Gnome installed, but I really don't like it. I really like Cinnamon, so if I could have Gui that is like Cinnamon, I would be very happy.
I did try XCFE but it wouldn't start. I was installing it along side the other desktops though, not on a clean system. Does it support scaling?
KDE seems like the most sane option so far, in terms of having a reasonable sensible way of starting apps and managing the desktop. It's got all the nice features like window snapping, and is extremely configurable. GNOME seems to have been removing configuration options for some reason.
The main issue with GNOME based systems is the crazy, failed mobile platform style workflow. KDE is more traditional. It also seems to be well debugged and supported - Chrome picked up scaling settings perfectly, and other apps at least were zoomed. To me that's a really good sign - someone thought about it, tested it, and there is support in third party apps.
Cinnamon fixes a lot of the insanity, but it's still not as nice as KDE. A lot of stuff seems to either not work or be very basic in Cinnamon too. It inherits GNOME's hatred of configurability, and the exceptionally mediocre GNOME apps.
I guess that's the other thing that KDE has going for it - the KDE apps generally seem to be better than the GNOME ones.
I think you should go with KDE if it suits your needs 
However, for GNOME there is a thing called GNOME Tweak Tool. Now, I don't know that it handles scaling, but all in all GNOME handles quite differently than many of the other DE's, and from Windows.
Thanks everyone for the advice, when I get to the lesson about changing GUI's I will give KDE a try. The reason I like Cinnamon so much it is the closest GUI like Windows I have tried.
Pretty sure, Chromium has better support on Linux. (Chrome is based on Chromium and should still support the addons/plugins etc.)
Also for a full beginner switch from Windows, would recommend Linux Mint. With whatever Desktop Environment you prefer. If you're going for the MS 10 look, give KDE a try. Which is the closest DE to MS10 of the available ones for Mint.
For a MS XP or 7, the Cinnamon DE.
Slackware inherently supports scaling, regardless of the window manager.
and for xfce there is this. https://slackware.pkgs.org/14.2/salix-x86_64/xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.1.2-x86_64-1gv.txz.html
I think maybe you got the wrong end of the stick... By "scaling" I mean for high DPI displays. If you have a 4k monitor you probably want everything to be 200% "normal" size, or it will be too small to read.
I might add that once you add a new DE, it's always a good idea to update, you would think that by installing a given DE on any given day that you would be installing the newest version / files...... that's not always the case.
Having said that KDE is my favorite DE on Fedora, it is a easy familiar interface that makes sense, it also offers more controls over the DE in logical places over Gnome IMHO, it is also updated often.
Unlike a Windows OS, in Linux you want to update, weekly is a good plan but always run update after installing anything new to insure you have the latest build, files, and features.
if it's hapening across major distros, then it could be a resource issue. Mint does require more resources compared to ubuntu and fedora but virtual emulation does consume a lot of resources. It's a different experience from actually installing and booting into that OS. maybe try it in dual boot? also, if you can try emulation over another device, do check fedora or ubuntu out. xubuntu is a low-res distro, so you can check that out too, though it might not have support as diverse as fedora and ubuntu.