I've got to say, I used to be a hard-core Caldera/RedHat/Mandrake guy for the server side.  I  am a web type, so php and asp.net are dear to me..  php is still great as a LAMP app, but it rocks as an IIS app, and especially so as ISAPI IMHO. 

After trying Enterprise AS3 (RH), Fedora Core, Gentoo, Ubuntu, MandrivaOne and some other flavor-thingy, I found them **ALL** to be a royal pain in the butt, compared to my Vista Beta 2 64 bit app which seems to be VERY COOL and FRIENDLY (after of course you kill off User Account Security annoyances.. hehe)

I too have been very critical of MSFT but I have to say, in recent years they have approached the developer community with open arms, made software more accessible and affordable to developers, and incrementally have been deploying (READ: SHIPPING) great code tools, both from within and outside (Anyone here ever use .NET Reflector? )

I was actually happy to refute a relatives "my text-file based web app is a whole lot faster and responsive" claims by dropping in an ODS, a GridView with some templatecolumns, and some Atlas controls..  Wham it took less than 30 minutes compared to her DAYS of text-file and javascript coding.  Sure it may be a bit more bit-heavy over the pipe, but had she tracing, caching, and performance capabilities in her text-file app??  Could the text-files be decoupled? Could we engage profiles, roles, and membership (read:security) features without some more hours of coding? 

The bottom line is, even beyond the desktop gadgets, the WCF and '3.0 Framework' features, Windows is as much and more a server app as Linux is.  But I feel the heat already Smiley Cool