Windows -
Who supplies it - Microsoft
Ease of installation - Childs Play
Range of Applications available - Lots
Network capability - Easy to make it connect to a network, can be insecure though.
Linux
Who supplies it - Released under Gnu Public Licence - Linus Torvald created it, but numerous people supply there own flavour of it - i.e. Ubuntu, Puppy, Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, etc.
Ease of installation - Depends on the flavour you chose and what you want to do with it and what hardware you have in your machine. Something like Puppy Linux is very easy to install, it boots straight from a CD, runs entirely in RAM, can save it's data to either a linux formatted hard drive or Windows partition, and has all the standard tools you could possibly need, plus recognises most hardware including many wi-fi cards.
Range of applications: Again many applications are available for Linux. Some applications like Microsoft Office aren't available but there are clones of these such as OpenOffice, plus there is WINE (stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator") which allows you to run many Windows programs under Linux. New programs and upgrades to existing programs are constantly being made daily by the Linux community and many are released as OpenSource to allow contribution from other people to fix bugs, or make enhancements (one of the main reasons why Linux has far fewer viruses on it than Windows - because someone finds a loophole in a program, the community realise it, the community patch that security loophole, where as with Windows it's a case of someone notices a security loophole, someone informs Microsoft, Microsoft patch the loophole if and when they can be bothered).
Network capability - Network capability under linux is very good if you want a secure and robust network. It can be a lot more secure from attacks than Windows. However some issues you may come across is compatibility with wi-fi network cards. Some wi-fi cards do not have compatible drivers for Linux, however that number is decreasing all the time, and there is NDIS wrapper which allows you to use most wi-fi drivers from Windows under Linux.
Out of the two I'd say Linux is great if your using it as a server, also some of the Linux Live CD's like Puppy Linux is great if you are just using your PC for browsing the internet (Chrome/Chromium OS is another Linux based OS that is great for browsing the net as well) . Windows failed on my laptop over a year ago and since then I've been using Puppy Linux fine because I just can't be bothered to re-install Window and it works fine for what I want out of my laptop - I can access the net, use facebook, watch youtube, read e-mails, edit photos in GIMP, do 3D rendering in Blender, use Office packages with OpenOffice. Plus a few other good things with this is that if I get a virus I can just backup all my documents onto a hard drive, reboot the computer and tell puppy to wipe all the previously saved sessions, then restore all my documents from the hard drive, which takes a total of about 5-10 minutes, far more quicker than the couple of hours backing data up in Windows, and then the re-installing Windows, and then copying all the data back again and then re-installing all the software, and also if the Puppy fails to boot due to corrupted media I just burn another Puppy CD, where as with Windows if it's hard disk failure I'd need to go and get another hard drive, remove the old hard drive, replace, and then re-install the hard drive. With Puppy I can be back up and running from a system failure in about 5-10 minutes as opposed to a few hours with Windows, and finally one more thing the latest edition of Puppy Linux is always available free of charge from puppylinux.com where as Microsoft can charge over £100 for a new edition every couple of years.