It's all changing so fast that most of us can't keep up with the changes...I just wish I didn't need to call a network guru every time my server has a hick-up. Is it gonna take AI for me to get a server that is as user freindly as the "Computer" on Star Trek?

The times may be a'changing...The soft technology market coming out of the crash is an economic problem, but one possibly good unintended consequence has been a slowdown in the development of brandnew technology, in favor of refinement and applications for existing technology. Geez, back in the Bubble new technology seemed to come along faster than most people could learn it and use it; we built up a backlog. There's more focus on ease-of-use and usefulness than on novelty these days, which, to answer your plaint, means we're seeing more "wizards" and "advisor" software everywhere, and more self-correcting and redundant systems. It may not have Majel Roddenberry's voice, but yeah, I think you will be seeing something related to AI come along and help you with that stuff. (OTOH, Majel could make a fortune licensing her voice for speech synthesizers!)

Short term, although Windows is more complex than Linux, Windows is still more user-friendly, on balance, because it exposes all kinds of configuration settings in dialog boxes; in Linux, you generally have to find and edit cryptic text files. Also, with Microsoft catering to the corporate market, Windows servers come with a lot of fancy administration and remote administration software.

But I'll give credit to one special category of Linux server: appliances, those cheap hermetically sealed boxes without even a keyboard or CRT, that you administer through generally easy-to-use Web interfaces. If you don't need your server to do anything fancier than share files and printers locally, maybe have a Web site and email on the Internet side, go with one of those things. Windows is too big and bloated at that scale.