why linux???

[Words Of Wisdom]

Gentoo is not a distro for someone not knowledgeable, sorry. Gentoo is several step above Ubuntu as to needing computer science skills. Actually, it's just one step below compiling everything on your OS yourself.
Gentoo is irrelevant here, you can't recommend Gentoo to someone that just want to casually try Linux.

I completely agree with most of that.  Gentoo is a hobbyist distro or masochist one depending on who you ask.

Session save is actually pretty relevant, as every user touted this as a life saver. They all said it was far above Windows just for this feature : when they switch the computer on, everything is already there. They nearly never need to open an app, so the snappy complaint, which just comes from geeks anyway, is a moot point, if only it were true (that Windows is snappier).

If you want to keep everything running all the time.  I like to get rid of things I'm not using.  If I'm not actively using an application, I close it.  If I'm not using an application often, it gets uninstalled.  Saving a session with all the programs I use frequently running at the same time would be inconvenient for me.

Linux stays harder to break than any Windows. Which explains why so many servers use it (and Unix), and also explains why it was the sole OS remaining unbroken in the latest "break my OS" contest (which put Windows server, OS X and Linux servers in the mix). The fastest to go down was Windows, followed by OS X. They couldn't break into the Linux in time (several days, I don't remember how much exactly, 3 or 5 I think).
Of course, security is a process.

As a side note to this, recent versions of Windows Server, while not *nix level, are fairly impressive (at least compared to what came before anyway...).

When a mission critical app isn't on Linux, people just will make it, as simple as that. Which is why it is used in the smallest wristwatch up to the most powerful computer cluster in the world. Crazy scalability and possibilities. That's what freedom gets us.
I'm Linux only since 2001 and have never looked back since. And I can do all the mission critical stuffs. I also puts it in big financial institutions for mission critical high load tasks, so I pretty well know what it's security state and efficiency is. It never let me down. Pretty amazing OS, that GNU thing.

Server utility is old, but utility as a desktop is not for the average user is not.  This is where it has made significant progress in the last few years.  It still has a long way to go however.  It's often quicker and easier to pull up a terminal and make a change than to step through 5 levels of unintuitive GUIs. -_-