• Filesystems: NTFS is just fucking old, creaky, slow and shit. Btrfs absolutely flies in comparison and does stuff that's light years beyond NTFS's capabilities.
• General performance stuff: Windows 7 takes ~35 seconds to boot on my machine. It takes a further 10-15 seconds before the desktop actually responds to interaction. Launching Firefox for the first time takes another 10 seconds. Linux boots to a fully hardware accelerated desktop in ~11 seconds. At which point it's responsive. FF then takes ~2 seconds to start for the first time. (none of this matters in itself, of course. I boot my PC once a day. It's just an indication).
• Linux has full virtualisation support built into the kernel. I can run my Linux desktop as a hypervisor and (assuming I have Vt-x and Vt-d) run Windows (or anything else) on top, fully virtualised (good for gaming).
• I can run software in a Docker, I can chroot and completely isolate the rest of my system. I Can run a wireless mesh network (again, built into the kernel). I can backup the entire system in about 100 (anything from a built-in Btrfs snapshot to a disk image to rsync to just a list of everything that's installed and all changed config files) different ways without noticing anything is happening and I can transfer that backup to pretty much any type of filesystem, local or remote, mounted locally with virtually no effort. I can do all this over ssh from my tablet if I want to.
• I don't have to download any fucking drivers fucking ever.
• I can update the whole system (OS and software) with a single command (or button press, if you're that way inclined) without having to reboot ever. Updates tend to take seconds rather than fucking forever as on Windows. And consist of feature and security updates rather than DRM. And I don't have to reboot ever during this process, except to use a new kernel, if I choose to.
• And now I can even play games, thanks to Gabe (cheer)

             , ,   , ,   , ,   , ,   , ,   
  `'        (o,o) (o,o) (o,o) (o,o) (o,o)  
   *\*      |)__) |)__) |)__) |)__) |)__)  
     ''`>-,--”-”---”-”---”-”---”-”---”-”----
,'.*''`               

This is nearly true. But definitely a million times better than Windows.

I've got hardware (maybe just one item) that needs drivers downloading (and annoyingly recompiling on kernel upgrade (so I don't kernel upgrade often on that system)). But the great thing is, the manufacturer has made drivers which work ok but some members of the community don't like them so they've made better drivers themselves!

The benefit of the Linux driver system (or the proof that Windows is shit for this) showed itself a few weeks ago when I found an old Video to USB adapter in a box of stuff. It wasn't mine, no idea how it got here but I wanted to use it. Plugged it into a Windows 7 system, couldn't find any drivers automatically. Searched all over the place based on USB ids, generic equivalents etc and came to the conclusion that support stopped at XP.

Plugged it into a Linux system and there it was /dev/video0

The great thing generally is, even if the driver was made mainline many many years ago, it'll still be there. As far as I'm aware "support" (actually being able to use the hardware) doesn't generally stop. There's going to be some exceptions but I know I'm much more confident these days of plugging something into a Linux system and it working right away. If it doesn't then dmesg usually gives you enough information to figure something out.

You can't go saying "immeasurably" and then go and measure it, man. That's just not on.