Innovative and integrated User experience. As a developer, I still have not come across development environment + documentation comparable to MSDN + Visual Studio.
Personally I find GNU Emacs to be a very good IDE. Otherwise did you have a look at Anjuta or KDevelop? What other development things did you look at?
I work on a C++ product that works on few platforms (Solaris, Win32/64, Linux).
Is this a GUI product. In that case Anjuta (for Gtk+) and KDevelop (for Qt) are good. For all other purposes Emacs is a good IDE, although I see hundreds of people achieve amazing results using a Vim/Shell/GDB/Valgrind/... combination, which can not really be called an IDE. :-)
Few things that Linux has innovated :
- IPTABLES
- RaiserFS
- Live CD
When I updated my AMD Athlon64 3200+ and VIA chipset based desktop to Fedora 10 x86_64, the kernel would crash 9 out of 10 times when I would try to boot it with a traceback indicating some problem with the driver for my Firewire PCI card. You know what, even then the boot process would recover, X would start, GDM would recover, and once I log into GNOME a nice little pop-up would come asking me that the kernel had encountered some problems and whether I would like to report this to kerneloops.org or not. Something called kexec and kdump at work behind the scenes. :-)
Don't know whether other OSes have this or not, but then who cares?
Cheers, Debarshi