It's also quite good at doing tasks extremely well, and with great stability. I had a file server running non-stop for over 5 years. No reboots in all that time. The only reason I rebooted it at all was when the power supply failed and needed to be replaced. My windoze servers like to be rebooted every 2-3 months to work happily.

It also gives the ability to do certain things that windows simply cannot do, although they're getting closer. Symbolic links are a good example.

For example, I currently have a need to share 7 documents from 7 different users with one user. This user does not need any other documents that these 7 people have in their folders. How do you share just 7 docs and nothing else in windows? You don't. Or you have to create 7 folders for 7 people and share all seven folders. But this requires changing the way these people like to sort their documents. In linux, you simply type "ln -s /path/docname /newpath/docname" for all seven docs and magically, the files can all appear in /newpath/ where the overseer can view all 7 docs. It's completely transparent to the users, and it just WORKS. ln -s creates a symbolic link, which is sortof like a shortcut, only better.