Wanted to point out an excellent post on The Bungling Sys Admin Blog. It's a response to TaoSecurity's Recommendations for Introduction to UNIX post. Bejtlich, who tends to be a bit of a FreeBSD homer, recommends FreeBSD with Ubuntu and/or Debian as alternatives. Matt, who has about 10 years of corporate linux administration expirence under his belt, makes an excellent counterpoint. His arguement is, if you are going to spend the time to learn, why not learn on a distribution that there is a high probability you will encounter in a real world production environment? He offers up Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Solaris as much more applicable alternatives.
I wholeheartedly agree with both both the choice of OS's and the reasoning behind them. Although I do have specific figures to back up my assertions, I would say that based on my expirences, these 3 OS's compose the lion's share of the *NIX market place and that if you were going to be maintaining a unix/linux based system in a real worl corporate environment, very high likely hood it will be one of these.
Cudo's to Matt for hitting the nail squarely on the head.
