Thanks again for your feed-back. It's always good to hear what people with a similar background think about these hardware components.
Motherboard, ASUS Z170-P. ASUS boards are worth it for the excellent fan control alone, and this is a better choice than the one you chose for less money.
The thing is that >95% of the time I'll be working with Linux. While the Gigabyte GA-H170-HD3 (DDR4) mainboard is supported out of the box, a lot of issues (in particular sound-related ones) have been reported with the ASUS Z170-P. Moreover, I'm not going to use over-clocking, therefore a Z series mainboard won't be necessary in my specific case.
Your selected Motherboard does not have digital audio I/O. What are your requirements for audio playback and downstream equipment? I would never recommend using the built-in analog outputs.
Again, the answer to this question is related to Linux. I'm going to use an external USB 2.0 audio interface. In fact, on Linux there are just two viable options that are said to work out of the box - the Focusrite Scarlett series and the Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6. Some people have reported issues with the the Focusrite Scarlett (i.e. crackling noises on startup or after hibernation), therefore I'm going to buy the Native Instruments device.
Get a caviar black and never look back.
Checked. Thanks for the hint.
hi and lo, please justify your recommendation of 32 GB of RAM. Unless you're running a server or doing pro 3D animation, there aren't many applications that can address that much, and it's also OS dependent
In fact, I'm an IT application engineer and I'm going to use several DBs and application servers for software testing. I might run a few other memory intensive applications like advanced log management frameworks (e.g. Splunk, ELK, etc.) or several virtual machines at a time. I've never been a gamer, though. So, every suggestion related to optimizing my PC gaming experience might indeed by overkill.
IMHO, it can't hurt to have >16 GB of RAM (as it's rather inexpensive). Depending on whether the video editing software can make use of GPU acceleration, one might need more or less RAM.
OP also states that he might need to run windows, so a VM could be in play (in lieu of dual booting). A perfect reason to have more ram. If you're doing any kind of video editing, you don't want to be splitting 16GB between the primary OS and a VM.
I'd rather not use a VM for video editing because VMs tend to use generic drivers. Performance-wise, it might be better to use a dedicated physical partition for Windows and the belonging software applications on the SSD. I'm going to use two separate HDDs for the source files (aka "master" recordings) respectively for the resulting, fully-processed audio and video files. Otherwise, concurrent read/write access to the same HDD might lead to a performance bottleneck.