...far as running applications?

Advantages: Unix was designed specifically for running multiple processes and has been multi-user for a much longer time. A great deal of the design is isolating the OS from the applications so that bad application code won't cause the whole maching to go kerblooey. No blue screen of death, no freezing, no one process taking all the memory. In my 21 plus years of programming in unix, the only time I saw system problems was when we were working with an early version of Xenix. But that was Tandy's version of unix - what would you expect? *grin*Unix's big disadvantage is the user interface. The normal interface is the command line. GUIs didn't come until much later and are bloated from trying to be anything to anyone. Some people have even said that Unix is "user hostile".However, new web technologies are enabling applications to be written with the user friendliness of a Mac or PC and the power of a Unix box.