Windows is the better for those who wish to work on easy things and all pretty stuff. But when comes to more flexibility and power Windows fails to provide that to their users.
Anyway, there are many discussions about that on web, I wish to focus on a special feature Linux has and Windows don’t have at all. That feature is derived by the Linux’s Open Source nature, which makes it the best operating system to those that really wish to take the most of their hardware.
The Windows system files, and most of the Windows applications are build to 386 processors. That is, they are shipped to work in almost any PC processor we know. That is a good thing for home users, but, when you wish to take the most of your computer there are some instructions the processor have and your applications will never use.
There are some exceptions, some applications that are optimized for a specific processor, but that approach makes things work at full performance on the target processor and again, failing back to a low performance profile if your processor is not the one the application was optimized. That seems good, except for a little loss of performance when the app need to check the processor type, also the size of the file is a little bit bigger thus consuming more memory – resulting in even more performance loss.
Lucky, in Linux I can rebuild the files to work on my processor, no increased size, and no loss of performance at all. This is a procedure that can take time to master and to do, but in the end the results are usually pretty nice.
I’ve noticed some big performance improvements after I rebuild some of mine system core packages, and each time I need to use Windows – for work 
– I surely cry of pain.
