It stays out of my way when I use it, it's highly customizable, KDE Plasma 5 is incredibly easy to use, any previous Windows user can get around it perfectly fine. Easy to install, and most distributions let you boot the OS live right off of the USB disk, usually sitting in a RAMdisk. You can build the kernel for whatever device you choose, and Linux runs on many embedded systems and servers. It is friendly with storage, and can usually help recover data from dying disks. Installing packages is often really simple, and most of the software is in repositories. Efficient on RAM, and disks, it has a very good I/O and processor scheduler, it can be run headless, or with a GUI. It can support a wide range of processor architectures.