[phyrrus9]

My mother is trying to overhaul their network at work, and wants a local server. I've tried to explain to her that in my opinion, Linux is far superior for severs, but shes dead set on Windows. What really is better for most applications, and why?

The answer depends on the applications i.e to be used on the server. If it is mostly open source like Apache, MySQL , PHP etc. go for a Linux server.

Reasons to use Windows server
1. No skill required to maintain
2. AD access, if your environment already uses it
3. You're using a large VM cluster (Hyper-V)

Reasons to use Linux server
1. You want total security
2. Low overhead environments
3. You have limited resources
4. You're building a compute cluster (big data)

Of course, with Hyper-V you can mix the two of them. If she is dead set on using windows, then get a beefy server and run the hyper-v build. Use windows server for all of the front facing components that need easy config (email, firewall, etc) and use centos for the data or compute side.