Advisement on server distro/workstation distro

Hey there,

I figured I would make a new topic since it didn't seem appropriate to continue in my last thread.

Let me just preface this with some things about myself.

I am 24 years old and I am finally trying to build a career for myself in IT. I have always been a huge nerd for technology, and recently have been falling in love with networking. I went to school for networking and plan on getting CCNA and CCNP eventually. Lately, I have been having this urge to align my hobbies (networking/datahoarding/server/homelab) with what I could be doing in a career environment.

I want to start working with linux and learning it. With that said, I have been using Ubuntu server, but recently I talked to a very successful friend of mine and he recommended for me to learn to work in centOS or fedora.

Currently, I have a PC that is running windows 10. I want to add a dual boot to this system. What do you think would be best to put on here? Do you agree with my friend? If not, what distro and why?

I also have a home media server currently running ubuntu server. I want to migrate to Fedora server. However, I am not sure if these are the correct moves to make.

I just had to check in with you guys who are always in a linux environment. Do you all think this is a good idea and will be beneficial for my career or am I just overthinking it?

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Personally I run Fedora 25 Workstation on my laptop, and have done some server-side things on the distro as well. My best advice to you is, try using Fedora and/or CentOS, and if you like it then continue on, otherwise stick with what will make advancing and understanding the more in-depth areas later on. Hope this helps.

EDIT: Spelling

  • AK
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I think you need to know both if you are starting now. Fedora leans closer to RedHat, which is still huge. But Ubuntu is doing a lot in cloud environments, and that momentum does not seem to fade.

Other than that it is always good to know at least 2 ecosystems.

Use virtualbox and install them both. Don't bother with multi booting IMHO.

I would say open suse.
Open Suse has things like live kernel patching which in my opinion sets it appart from the rest wenn it comes to being a server distro.
But yeah Fedora or Centos would also be good choices.

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OpenSUSE is the best option for servers IMHO.

You can't forget YaST. Best config tool I've seen in my life.

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Yeah it pretty much comes with all the tools you need.
And for a server OS in particular its really great because of live kernel patching.
But i could very well say, that for a workstation it will also be great.
I think that Open Suse is definitelly one of the most reliable OS for such kind of situations.
For new users, it might be a bit intemidating, but Open Suse and Yast have come a pretty long way wenn its comes to improving userfriendlyness.

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I think that Open Suse is definitelly one of the most reliable OS for such kind of situations.

Without a doubt. We use SLES for the bare metal that's running our openstack cloud. We take the servers down maybe once a year for major kernel updates, or if there's hardware failures. The feature that's saved my ass a few times is snapper. Booting into a snapshot is the greatest feature I've seen in a while.

It's just a matter of spending a bit of time digging through the menus, getting familiar with it.

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tumbleweed or leap?

for a server, I'd recommend Leap.

Tumbleweed is rolling release.

My My, how far we’ve come from this. Any future visitors wondering the same. This was before I had a job and I do see now that CentOS is ran a lot, but you will be just fine if you learn ubuntu server. You will transition just fine.

I Just started running in gentoo, and I work in lubuntu every single day. I can’t believe I didn’t do this any sooner.

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