Without fabric, you'll never get the gravel up. It will sink into the dirt. If you don't smother everything growing under the gravel, it will be a weedy mess.

With the fabric the weeds grow above the fabric. Pea gravel looks so good- that big drive in front of downton abbey. We had a small temporary path made from it and it was dreadful- tracked everywhere, migrated...

It will be the most miserable frustrating experience of your life removing it. You are either digging up clumps of pebbled dirt, or trying to sift the pebbles out. And weeks, months, years after you think it’s all gone, more appears.

Pea gravel will still get weeds, regardless. Probably have to rake it out of your grass too, even if you have a border. How come you’re thinking pea gravel instead of mulch?

my thoughts..I hate both landscape fabric and pea gravel..

To prevent weeds growing through in a year or two, probably 4 inches. No joke. And you'll never get it out.

People will tell you that it works, but don't forget to read on. For example you can get away with maybe 3 inches if you do this, but that's probably not what you had in mind.

Compared to other hardscaping materials, installing pea gravel is relatively easy. Generally, you work the soil about 6 inches deep, remove any weeds, lay down 2 inches of coarsely textured base rock (also called crushed rock), and cover that with a 3-inch-deep layer of pea gravel. The base rock stabilizes the pea gravel to provide a firm surface. https://www.gardenista.com/posts/hardscaping-101-pea-gravel/

Wouldn't want to use it on a large space even with the fabric. Without the fabric, wouldn't use it t all. If the place you're considering putting it is a modest sized planting area, consider instead outlining the area with brick or pavers in the ground with only the top showing and then keep the planting area "dirt" -- perhaps moss or low growing ground cover that will crowd up most weeds making it easier to just pull them out as they grow, especially when the ground is wet.

We'd need more details of what you want to achieve and where it is in relation to fences etc to say how advisable or inadvisable pea gravel is. When our kid was little, she loved playing in pea gravel more than anything (she's now a geologist). So we had a huge multi-ton load dumped in the back yard. It was contained by boards, ended up about six inches deep. As the years went by, we'd shovel some out to use in other projects. As the pea gravel layer thinned, grass and weeds moved in. A couple times per year, I'd rake gravel and pull weeds -- not pleasant work, but kept it okay for a play yard if you weren't too fussy. Long term, the plan was to either hire a bobcat to doze it all out and replace with clean dirt for a garden, or buy large pavers to suppress the weeds and turn it into a patio. But we moved and I don't know what the new owners have done.

Bottom line -- getting rid of pea gravel is not easy. Think about how much work you are willing or able to hire out and how much machinery would be involved.

We have pea gravel. I hate it. The house sat in foreclosure for 2 years and the landscaping fabric was visible everywhere. We found that it had 2 different ecosystems. One under and one in the pea gravel. Last summer, we removed the fabric. This year, we have an even bigger mess. We are contemplating digging up the desirable plants and killing everything else and having only container beds. I would really look at another option.