I've been using Red Hat 9 (which is a couple of years old) on one computer recently and Firefox is noticably faster on Linux than on W2K. The lack of software is a bother, though, especially something like PhotoShop (GIMP does a lot but is harder to use than PS).
The multiplicity of sources for Linux probably means greater stability of design as there isn't a single source who can change everything at will.
Isn't Adobe coming out with a Linux/Unix version of Photo Shop and Illustrator? My biggest gripe is my favorite game (Age of Empire) will not run on Linux or any of the emulators very well.
Odd. I've had occasion to run some large multithread applications under both RH9 and Cygnus under W2K. They did noticably better under Cygnus, must have something to do with how it handles threads.
Single thread apps do run better under RH9 though.