A few weeks ago I came up with an idea to develop a mobile app which will direct students in my university to the nearest printer availiable. The whole thing is part of my final project. The Android based app will need to perform the following tasks: The user's location in the campus is sent to the server. Assume this part works just fine. The server sends an SNMP request to the printers in the user's vicinity. I'll probably use PHP or Python for that part. The data requested by SNMP is processed and sent back to the client My question concerns the server. The university's IT manager offered me a designated server for development, which sounds great. Now I need to choose which OS I want installed on the server - Windows server or Linux (don't know which versions). I don't have any server programming/operating experince, but generally speaking I feel more comfortable in Windows enviroment (just because that has always been my OS). I don't have much time for learning a new OS, but when does it make sense generally to host or develop server side applications on a Windows environment versus a Linux environment?