Thanks for all the info. Definitely going to switch over now that I got my drivers working (Complete user error, LOL. Scaling Wtf.)
Does my z87 and 5670k support hardware acceleration for virtual machines? I would look it up, but I'm not sure whats required.
You support virtualization, Phantom.
I recently installed proprietary Nvidia 319.60 drivers on my #! installation, and that was a bit of a pain. I had updated the kernel to 3.10 something. The Cuda toolkit works fine, though, and the drivers, after extensive purging of all existing Nvidia and Nouveau drivers and headers, worked fine. Performance is drastically better than the 304 series driver I had installed before. Then again, you have ATI. I don't know much about ATI drivers, or their situation on the *nix, but from what I've heard, they aren't that terrible.
As for a distro, I would recommend you go for Arch; rolling release, very fast, super-lightweight. I just finished up my second Arch installation yesterday; surprisingly easy, if you're comfortable with CLI.
Gnome 3 is poop. I hate it, can't stand it whatsoever. Memory hog, gaudy, and just not good looking, to me. I am a fan of AwesomeWM and OpenBox, both of which are low-memory, high-performance, and highly customizable. AwesomeWM is my favorite, but most recently, I've been loving OpenBox - tiling WMs have my heart, though.
Is there a gui for Arch? I don't think I could go CLI yet, at least not for linux.
It's CLI installation. You can install whatever DE you want.
This is the big question that I don't have an answer for. For what I've heard, Z87 in principle supports VT-d, but few motherboards have it enabled, and it doesn't work with some proprietary PLX chips. In practice, few systems with the Z87 can get VGA passthrough working.
Your CPU supports VT-x, so in any case, you'll at least be able to run virtualbox without VGA passthrough. Downside is that - if you don't have VT-d - the bulk of your graphics card performance will depend on the linux driver for your graphics card. So use a 3.11 kernel to get more performance out of that catalyst driver. I don't use virtualbox myself because it's not open source and taints the kernel, but virtualbox with virtualbox-guest-additions installed is the way to go for high graphics performance windows gaming. Kvm is faster in the CPU department than virtualbox/vmware, and QEmu can emulate as many cores as you want instead of as many as you have, but it doesn't have DirectX additions, so for gaming without VT-d, it's not the right solution. Of course, if your system is VT-d compatible, kvm is the best option, because you don't even need the catalyst driver in linux, the card will be controlled directly from the windows virtual machine with the catalyst windows driver, and with Qemu, you'll be able to set the number of cores to 8 for instance for Windows, if BF4 runs faster on 8 cores (which remains to be seen), that would be a good thing.
Gnome 3 is not as much of a memory hog as it's often portrayed as. The only thing that's annoying about it technically - that means personal preferences aside - is the fact that there are some bugs that will annoy bleeding edge power users with all of the wayland and weston/mutter experiments going on. When Gnome 3 is a bit more reliable again, I'll switch to it because for productivity, it seriously rocks, it's like the linux version of an OSX-type interface, dumbed down, focus on sober and sleek "minimalist design" looks, but very efficient to use for getting work done. Might not be a priority for many users, but it certainly is for others. In the end, the choice of DE is like with everything in linux, a personal choice. The good thing is that you can actually switch to another DE at any time.
Okay, So i believe that I am going to run Arch, with KDE on top of it. Because I love the idea of a "Widget" system.
If I'm assuming correctly. WINE, Visualization, and everything will run the same in Arch? Games and all? (Same as ubuntu?) Well. If my system supports it.
Alright, I guess I'll just try it, and see what happens.
Im going to start with Xubuntu. -.- Until I can fully understand Arch.