[colug-432] Introduction and distro preference question

[jep200404 at columbus.rr.com]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:30:24 -0500, Dan Kaiser <dank2878 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've read also that if you're at all interested in a Linux
> profession (something I'm open to down the line) you really should only be
> using RHEL/CentOS or Fedora.

No. 

As a professional, one's knowledge should be broader than that.
Professionals often have to deal with a mix of stuff, 
good and bad, new and old, so you should know a variety of 
distros, especially from different camps. 

For example, amongst the various kinds of differences, 
know both RPM based and apt based distros. 
RHEL is reliable, boring, and RPM based. RHEL is geared towards 
servers.Centos is the poor man's version of RHEL, so learn how 
to use Centos. 
Debian has the other popular package system, 
and many distros are derived from it, so learn 
Debian or *buntu. 

If you want to learn how things are put together, 
do something like Linux from Scratch or Gentoo Linux.

It would not hurt to learn a unix, 
such as one of the BSDs. 

You see the variations on the various themes and would not be 
caught off guard when you come across yet another distro.