On Fri, Dec 30, 2011 at 6:55 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
I do understand that it tends to dominate in the US
and very
US-dominated areas, though, and in the commercial paid-support sphere.
Quite so.
If I was working as a Linux sysadmin, I expect I'd
have to learn RHEL
or Centos and use it.
From 2003 through 2010, I used an RHEL or CentOS
desktop/laptop every
day to maintain a pile of RHEL or CentOS servers (physical and
virtual). I bet on RedHat, professionally, starting with RH5.1, and
that made me a lot of money (plus it got me to the South Pole). My
most recent gig, however, is Ubuntu-Server-centric (there's some RHEL
and CentOS still, but more Solaris than those two combined). My
present position aside, I see many, many job postings here looking for
RHEL and/or CentOS skills and a much smaller number of posting seeking
Suse experience, and almost nothing else.
I'm not trying to claim RedHat is better, just the most commonly
sought skill-set for Linux admins in the States. I've had my share of
frustration (especially with trying to use recent versions as a
workstation OS and most especially on laptops), but I think back to
how much "fun" we used to have trying to add hardware to monolithic
4BSD kernels that took 2-4 hours to recompile and how bad it was
trying to port applications and games from a SYSV world into the BSD
world, and modern Linux problems don't seem so hard anymore.
I started with 4BSD on a 2MB VAX-11/750 and Ultrix 1.1 on a 3MB
VAX-11/730. Lots of improvements since then, but unlike my
compatriots who were fiddling with MS-DOS, the commands and languages
and skills I learned 26 years ago are still relevant to my day-to-day
job (though it's nice to be doing it on hardware that costs hundreds
of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars - that's a
handy consequence of Moore's Law).
-ethan