One advantage of linux that I especially like, is that the applications become "part of" the system, as the system itself essentially consists of different applications (or packages, rather). That is, at least as long as the applications are installed through the system package manager. The advantage is, that everything is updated via the same system.
Coming from World of Windows where each application is a separate entity, distinct from the system itself, this took a while getting used to. I wanted my applications to go in some "Programs" folder and stay there. But after a few system updates that not only updated my system, but all of my applications as well, I realized that there's going to be no more quirky auto-updaters for each application, no need to run a "check for updates" from some menu, no more downloading and installing patches manually. They just update. Just like that. You do get a tiny taste of this in Windows these days as Office updates itself via Microsoft update. Now just think of that for every application.
The downside is that you might have to mess with packet repositories, which still has some quirks. You can ignore this as long as you use applications that are available in the general distribution repositories - and most are, really - but if the application isn't there, you'll need to add it's repository for it to become available. Also, at least with Ubuntu, there's quite a huge delay before completely new versions of applications, like OpenOffice 3, become available unless you add their own repositories. I hope that adding repositories some day becomes as easy as adding applications, and we can forget all the mess about manually downloading and adding authorization keys and all that.