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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

The differences among Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise qualified/competent admin can be expected to easily learn everything important in days or weeks.

Not sure I agree. After years of using Debian, I had a hard time administering CentOS. yum is a cruel joke... and that's when the dependencies aren't messed up. The quality control and the intrinsic design is ... inconsistent. This makes it hard to administer, and I would certainly never take a job where I would be responsible for CentOS or Redhat.

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I feel similarly. To me, as a (primarily) Debian user, there's Debian and all the distros that descend from it, then there's all the others. This differentiation exists in my mind primarily because of the difference in package management.

It's not that I couldn't use CentOS and stuff (I have and still do to some extent), but I certainly have a much harder time of it. I guess that would probably change pretty quickly if I really wanted it to.

I don't want to though.

So, do you disagree that "any otherwise qualified/competent admin" could easily learn to use a different distro than the one(s) they know?

(I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now. Time was people made an effort to reply to what you actually said (and meant), not just state some tangentially related populist opinion. Maybe it's just me though...)

Someone competent with linux ( More than "Oh I run a vps all by myself") should easily be able to learn how to do the same administration tasks on another.

It may end up taking longer to do certain tasks and they may have to refer to documentation more often than someone competent in that distro thinks they should but linux is relatively universal and once you get past initial setup maintenance becomes rather similar.

maintenance becomes rather similar

In that any task can be completed in an unbounded amount of time. If you want to do things quickly, though, all Linuxes are not the same.

I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now.

I've noticed an increase in the number of replies I get like this on HN now...

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