you can't apply a lot of Debian/Ubuntu knowledge to other things, such as once I saw someone try both "sudo" and apt-get on a SCO machine they were unfamiliar with, of course it didn't work. The knowledge you gain, especially with the latter two, will be applicable to damn near everything else, but the opposite isn't true.
#WINDOWS VS MAC OS X VS LINUX VS FREEBSD WINDOWS#
If I were you, I'd focus on Windows Server, FreeBSD, and probably Fedora. Instead keep it broad enough to where you're basically learning both, and not using dumbed-down stuff like Debian/Ubuntu is a great start for that. However, I must admit using a real version of Linux or BSD you can learn most things you'll be able to apply to almost all Linux and BSD distros, as well as other Unix children like SCO, Solaris, etc.ĭon't choose as in "which will be the future?" because that's not a good question and it's not one anyone can answer.
I actually don't really use Linux at all, I mostly use FreeBSD and a few Solaris machines. If you use a more normal Linux distribution you can actually learn real Linux, not the Fisher-Price version. Keep in mind that the sort of Debian/Ubuntu stuff like apt-get, sudo, etc isn't really standard. It's better to just become familiar with as much as you can. Of course, plenty of legacy applications will keep Windows Server around for a while, or maybe things may change in the direction Microsoft (or the community) takes the OS. The issue to remember is that the traditional platform is dying and things are moving out to the web, so the client OS is becoming less important and that's partly pushing out Windows.
#WINDOWS VS MAC OS X VS LINUX VS FREEBSD PLUS#
Plus "of the future" is sort of vague, do you mean for servers? If so, then Linux or BSD is probably the answer. If you aren't planning on using ZFS or something, there's no reason to use Solaris, in the same way if you don't plan on using Microsoft products or a Microsoft-language then there's no reason to pay for Windows. A lot of things, especially POSIX compliant things, you can get to work on Solaris, but sometimes not. FreeBSD has more wide usage and a larger community than Solaris, and more directly compatible drivers.