The Best system admin distro in the future?

Hi good people,
Which operating system should I choose, which one will be the best in the future…?
Rocky, Ubuntu, or…?

To answer the question: depends what you’re looking for and potentially what companies you’ll be working with. There are a few companies that use Ubuntu, but learning the RHEL family is probably a better idea. Go with Rocky or Alma and learn how it works (if you can master garbage like selinux and the more recent fapolicyd, that most people just disable, you get bonus points).

I’ve seen quite a few big enterprises using SLES and even less using Ubuntu, most just stick to RHEL.

To go around the question and propose other in-depths alternatives: I’ve learned most of the basics of CentOS when working with it, but as a somewhat linux enthusiast, I’d say that RHEL doesn’t really teach you a lot about linux. It’s unfortunate that people hiring don’t look at people who know gentoo or nixos with the same eyes (well, subject matter experts would, just not HR people who actually recruit).

Gentoo teaches you about the underlying system and gives you the tools (well, mostly gentoo specific) to tune your OS and programs to your system’s resources.

NixOS is a completely different kind of beast that makes everything on the system replicable and reproducible via its package manager (even on other distros). Using it makes implementing stuff like immutable infrastructure an ease. Unfortunately, implementing something like nixos in an already existing datacenter is probably not that possible as a newcomer and implementing it in a small infrastructure kinda leaves the company in a tough position that, if their nix expert leaves, they may be unable to find a suitable replacement and may be needed to undo the changes and move to something they can find talent for (like RHEL).

(As an even more side track note, I wish there was a nixos version running s6 in a not janky way, because nixos doesn’t even really make use of systemd properly, it has its own config to enable startup unit files, albeit using systemd).

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Very clear explanation! Thank you @ThatGuyB :100: :handshake: :wink: :muscle:
For now, I’ll stick with RHEL, then we’ll move on. I think that is the best solution for me for now!
I took the Linux admi test but I didn’t pass, I have to study more… :roll_eyes: :face_holding_back_tears:

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Good luck on your studies. Try hosting something yourself, even as a test. Best way to learn is by practicing.

Set up something simple, like a html website with nginx, do a reverse proxy on it and make a squid caching proxy. If you feel more adventurous, set SSL certificates on the reverse proxy and set up a Vaultwarden docker container. Those are pretty easy projects, all involving web servers.

You can do monitoring on them by using Prometheus + Grafana, by installing node_exporter on your VMs. Well, you could technically set all of these in one VM, but I would suggest going with multiple VMs or LXC, just to get used to RHEL and CLI more.

Running a minimalist desktop is also a way of learning. You can set up a status bar by using generic commands, like grep and awk and see useful information on your system, like traffic. Well, in absence of that, as another homework, you can create a script to monitor your network traffic since the script was started and run an average up / down and show you an output every 5 minutes or something. You can also do some shell math and get the CPU temperature.

For an experienced admin, this would take like 2 or 3 days. You can probably do this in a month or so, with a bit of struggle, although no deadline should be set.

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A minor explanation.

These are two different things. A reverse proxy, for those who don’t know, is the server which people from the outside connect to, which serves (redirects) pages to other web servers (either also reverse proxies, or actual web servers - apache and nginx serve both as reverse proxies and web servers, for better or worse).

Squid proxy is a proxy for your browser. You set your browser to connect to the proxy and this will be the actual source appearing on the websites you visit.

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@ThatGuyB Send me links for these tasks, with tutorials… Youtube, Udemy, Lynda, Please.
I think it’s the best way because I don’t understand all of this… :roll_eyes::smile: :pray:

I have no idea what good links are there. Just try looking up “install squid proxy” and “enable caching squid proxy.” For reverse proxy “nginx reverse proxy setup.” Fairly basic tasks.

Aside from just taking an exam, searching skills are imperative in the IT world. You need to know what to search and how.

I’d stay away from places like Udemy and Lynda. Youtube is so-so, depends what you can find. Just don’t look for robot sounding videos, those are generally junk quality.

Look for random sites online, maybe fossbytes, itsfoss, howtogeek, linuxhint and tecadmin. Content is plenty out, just need a bit of initiative (and I’m not saying it because I’m lazy - I am lazy, but I’ve also been through the same ritual when I learned).

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