I'm currently switching to a new laptop that will be my main machine and currently I use a laptop and a desktop on a daily basis. The laptop will continue to be used by another member of my family but the desktop will no longer have any use (well I might later build a new desktop but this one has finished his service).
The machine in question has: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ @ 2.4GHz 4x512MB DDR-400 (2GB Total) Seagate 200GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB Cache Hard Drive Geforce 6600GT 256MB GDDR3
Since I will no longer use it as a desktop/working machine I'd like to set it up as a home server. However I can't decide which OS to use for that. I have access to all Windows Versions since XP/2003 (with the exception of Windows Home Server) and I have some knowledge using both Windows and Linux so that's not a problem on my choice.
I want the server to have: File Server Print Server Remote Desktop access (or VNC in case of Linux) Web Server (for testing deployment of my projects. Mostly PHP and MySQL but occasionally I might work on ASP.NET (however I currently have no running projects on that platform)) Download Server (both HTTP and Torrents) Backup Server (to an external HDD) ...
I think a Linux server, for example Ubuntu, can do all of this and more but since most computers on the network will be running Windows (my laptop may run Ubuntu sometimes) maybe it's better to have a Windows server instead of Linux. For example performance on Samba is not as if I was using Windows Server 2008 R2 that support SMB 2.0, am I right? Also I'd like to know if managing permissions to the shared folder is straight-forward on Samba since it's not a native implementation of Windows permissions. All of that is important...
Finally my external hard driver are formatted on NTFS and using NTFS-3G while mostly safe has proven from time to time to ask for a CHKDSK when I connect a disk on Windows which makes me unsure about the safety of my data, however I have never noticed any real data loss.
So what do you think? Windows or Linux or other?
