There are lots of this it "can" but for some reason Linux does terribly. At the moment my kids are playing minecraft on the home network on one Windows 7 and one Ubuntu machine. That works fine. My wife can use it for Internet and documents just fine -in fact she has to use Ubuntu to do banking because the Windows computer has that stupid conduit thing going on...

Ninety per cent of the time we can also use that Ubuntu computer to serve movies without really any performance issues other than that every once in a while it all just starts randomly not working at all. I could probably fix it if I were an expert user or if I were willing to waste a weekend trawling blogs and forums.

But here's the good thing - if it all gets too much for me and my meager trouble shooting skills it's really very straight forward to wipe the entire operating system and start from scratch again. All my files and settings are on a separate partition to the operation system, so I can just get rid of it if it shits me and put a new one on. Heck, I have an entire spare partition with xubuntu on it. If I get sick of Ubuntu fucking around with my mediatomb (probably related to recent power outages and the computer not turning off properly or something - it works I just cant get it to work automatic so I have to do it manually each time. Which is fine for me personally but it makes it harder to convince my wife that Linux is cool when she has to do particular command line codes to just get the thing to work when it gets restarted) then honestly I've got some very basic options that are absolutely overkill but not terribly much actual trouble. You just can't do that on windows.

But as far as everyday stuff goes, no there's nothing that windows can do that linux can't. It can run Internet and download torrents and serve media and sync your files and play movies. The only thing we ever had any trouble with was getting my wife's ipod to sync.