Ok, I'll bite.
I'm a Windows admin, but I just went to a training course to learn about a high-end enterprise product that runs on top of Linux. I've dabbled with Linux-based stuff before (proxies, VMware, ESX, etc...), so it's not exactly new territory, but I figured it's 2013, it'll be interesting to get a glimpse into the current state of the "Linux Enterprise" world.
My experience was this:
-- You still need to patch, or install 140+ dependencies to install one application. Same difference.
-- You still need to reboot. A lot. More than I thought. I suspect that it is possible to avoid most of them though by judiciously restarting services, but the effort is much higher and the outage level is practically the same, so what's the benefit, really?
-- Things that really ought to be automatic, aren't. I spent a good 50% of the lab doing really fiddly things like cut & pasting iptables rules to open firewall ports. The installer really should have just done that for me.
-- Binding services together and just generally getting things to start up and talk required an awful lot of error prone manual labour. The lab guide was liberally sprinkled with warnings and "do not forget this or else" sections. Lots of "go to this unrelated seeming file, and flip this setting... because.. just do it or nothing will work."
-- I love the disclaimer in the training guide: "Linux configuration scripts do not tolerate typos, are case sensitive, and are not possible to validate before running the associated service." Fun stuff. I can't wait to diagnose random single-character problems in 10 kilobyte files when the only error is that one of a dozen services barfed when started.
-- Wow, the 70s called and wanted their limitations back: spaces in file names? You're risking random failures! Case-insensitive user names? Nope. Unicode text? Hah! IPv6? In theory, not in practice. GUI config wizards? Nope. Text-based config wizards? Not many of those either. Want to make a configuration change to a service without having to stop & start it? You're dreaming! An editor more user friendly than vi? Eat some cement and harden up princess!
-- I love the undecipherable command-line wizardry. I'm not an idiot, but how-the-fuck would I know what "-e" does on some random command? There is just no way without trawling through man pages using a command-line reader with no mouse support and keyboard shortcuts I don't know. Compare this to a sample PowerShell pipeline "Get-Process -Name 'n*' | sort -Descending PagedMemorySize". You'd have a hard time finding an IT engineer that can't figure out what that does.
I keep hearing about the supposed efficiency advantage of Linux, but I just don't see it. Given a Hypervisor, PowerShell, and Group Policy, Windows administration a piece of cake in comparison.
Go admin an IIS server and your opinion will change rapidly!
I play with some php scripts on some VMS on my home machine but the admins I have talked too love the CLI and the non registry of Unix. There are some things were the only option is to do a reformat and install because of something you did with Windows 6 installations ago. Changing an XML file wont fix it as it is event driven and the registry is a black box of cryptic hex decimal keys!
With Apache or cgnix you just edit the files and resstart the service. Done!
Yes shell scripts are a pain to work with but you are in charge of a complex operation and have full control. It is like the old joke with the unix plane being a full f-16 you need to assemble while the Windows one is done as a crappy flight 737 with glitches with the everything bolted on so the pilot just works around the glitches.
When playing with a full setup for $100,000+ worth of equipment such skill is needed is needed. Maybe not to run Word but customization as pain as it is required. Even under windows you need to know registry entries and word seldom used win32 apps in the /system32 directory in your admin work and advanced VSphere knowledge before a recruiter will even talk to you.