I don't mind win 10 either (run it on my surface book) as an OS but have never run it in a production environment and from what I've heard it can be disastrous (granted last I heard that was when win 10 was first released).
3 of the desktops that I use, have a very Win 10 look about them. It's not all the way there (live tiles etc, it's like a combo of Win 10 and Win 7 Start panel), so I do like the Windows paradigm, I just don't like their philosophy with their flagship OS and how it does.
In my opinion, it still is disastrous. Now granted, I can understand update issues with Windows given how many different hardware/software combos that are out there with Windows. But this latest iteration of having a couple of major builds twice a year and the major builds going EOL every 18 months has effectively made it a rolling release distro (shoot Fedora only has an lifespan of 13 months, not much more then an OS that is known for being bleeding edge, and I did run that on production computers for a couple of yrs). That isn't good for production, probably ok for the vast amount of everyday users, but not in a production environment.
Shoot, I have quite a few newsfeeds of software vendors and hardware vendors on FB that make the wares for both (sometimes all 3 major PC OSs) and even with High Sierra coming out, they said not to upgrade to it until patches are made. So even within the Mac ecosystem it happens. Happens with all of them, I just think it's more of an issue with Windows due to all the different combos out there.
Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe in keeping up to date, but I do not believe in updating whenever MS has deemed it worthy to upgrade and forces it on me.
That is not good for production. They can deprecate and remove anything that they want in an upgrade that could stall anyone's business and that would force you to upgrade or what until that vendor can send out a fix. That's no bueno at all.
Truth be told, I firmly believe that production rigs shouldn't be online to begin with, but with SaaS really taking off (horrid in of itself) that precludes that option for quite a few people. Hence going the VM route as long as those programs are still viable, may not always be the case, but I'm holding out as long as efficiency and productivity don't take a nose dive.
As far as running a Linux host with VMs... that would be out of my knowledge base and there's not enough time to learn that with the way things are going these days! I've played around with vm ware before but not enough to setup something like that. Seems like you would need some Linux knowledge and know how to run that setup smoothly.
It's not like 10 yrs ago. It really has come a long way and yea, there would be some googling, but fairly easy to setup. I use VirtualBox though. I have used VMWare and it's good, but again, run some of the same issues with deprecation that I may not want. With VirtualBox I can get the source code and compile if I need to maintain an older version to still have support for my VMs on a newer OS. Hasn't happened, but I always like to have a Plan B.
While I would suggest GNU/Linux in a heartbeat and just VM either Windows or Mac to use whatever programs are absolutely necessary, if one isn't ready to deal with a little bit of change and muddle through it don't do it. It's gotten easier, but have to have the right frame of mind. But my word, have a lot more options and power with the Linux OS then with Windows, but that does mean breakage if one isn't careful.
