I'm not arguing for the superiority of Windows, I'm pretty sure Linux+Apache was superior back then to Windows+IIS and is superior now. However, you could proba

I'm not arguing for the superiority of Windows, I'm pretty sure Linux+Apache was superior back then to Windows+IIS and is superior now. However, you could probably play audio, open a Word document and play 3D accelerated games on said NT box - not necessarily things you'd want to do, but the complexity to support these use cases was there anyway. My point is, full-fat desktop OS-es are much more complex beasts that a bare-bones Linux server install, that probably is a bunch of init-scripts and a server process on top of the kernel. Once you try to turn a UNIX into a desktop OS, it'll have the same problems as Windows, for the same reasons.