Member Avatar for acidplasm

Hi Everyone,

Everyone likes talking about what distro they use at home, what about what distro of Linux or UNIX is best to learn as a young tech admin. I am currently heavily into AIX with some Red Hat and Suse experience. I am noticing a large shift to Linux from UNIX. Is it just me? Would it be better for a career move from UNIX to Linux? And if so which Linux, or does it matter...

Thanks all

Edited by acidplasm because: n/a
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As noted, many shops move from proprietary UNIX to Linux. and are correct that much of what you learn transfers between systems, and and rightly stress breadth and troubleshooting. Rather than backing one brand, choose a career strategy: pick a target employer or sector, then build a portable skillset that makes you the safe hire.

Focus on transferable, high-value skills: service and process management (init/systemd and how services persist); filesystems, LVM and storage layout; networking and routing basics plus firewall/hardening concepts; authentication/ACLs and mandatory access controls; package and dependency troubleshooting across package families; scripting and automation so day‑to‑day tasks are reproducible; containers and basic orchestration; and monitoring, logs and backup/recovery. Those topics move with you between vendors.

A practical 8–12 week plan: get two small lab VMs (different families), document an install-to-production checklist, and run three projects — (1) configure a multi-disk LVM and simulate restore, (2) automate a repeatable service deployment with an infra-as-code tool, (3) containerize a sample app and run it with simple orchestration. For each project keep a short writeup: goals, commands used, failure modes and recovery steps. That portfolio is far more convincing than saying you “use distro X.”

When choosing which distro to learn first, let job ads decide: match the stack of the employers you want. Consider vendor certifications only as validation of skills (use them selectively). Above all, be able to explain troubleshooting steps and show a couple of small, complete projects — hiring managers care more about the how and the results than the distro logo on your laptop.

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Member Avatar for rubberman

What you learn from Linux is almost 1-1 applicable to Unix systems. I would recommend that you use a Red Hat clone such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. That's what I do, and we use RHEL at my company which is one of the biggest mobile phone companies in the world.

Member Avatar for celthunder

rhel and debian are pretty common. With that said, learning from one distrobution usually goes to pretty much any other with little to no modification depending how specific you get but most generic things work on them all.

Member Avatar for Pjieter

I guess, as already said above: when you know the one, you know all the others (more or less).
Frequently used distros are:
Debian for everyday use (for example webserver, medium-scale)
Ubuntu for people new to linux
SUSE for high-perfomance servers (professional users)

But, of course, this is very stereotypical; you can choose what to do with each distro, as they all are pretty similar!

Edited by Pjieter because: n/a
Member Avatar for Habitual

Servers:
1. CentOS
2. Debian (Not a derivative)

Desktop:
OpenSUSE 11.4

but being in IT as a SysAdmin, you get called on to troubleshoot a lot of things.
Knowing a little about a lot can help greatly, the biggest task is the package-manager, after Security.

after yum, apt-get and zypper, they are all pretty much the same "under the hood".

Member Avatar for Member #33065

I would agree with Habitual. Focus on your troubleshooting and investigation skills. Even if the organization you are at is on a certain platform, they may not be down the road. Don't limit yourself to the *NIXes either. We used to be running our ERP on AIX and had a handful of Linux boxes. In the 12 years I've been at the company I work for, we've moved 100% over to Windows servers. I for one was thankful that I had plenty of skills in that area as well.

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