If I learned Linux administration on a specific distribution, will those skills be applicable to any other distribution as well?Do I have to re-learn everything from scratch each time I touch another distribution? If not, what can I expect to be the same and what can I expect to change?
Do Linux system administration skills transfer across distributions?
linux
Some things change while others do not. One of the main differences between the different Linux distributions is their software package management. For example, the Debian world (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint etc) use dpkg and apt-get while the Red Hat world (RHEL, CentOS, openSuSe etc) use rpm and others can use yet other tools. The basic ideas will be the same but the specific tools you use to administer and install software will change. Things like user administration, security, file management etc will be the same across distributions with only minor, aesthetic changes or no changes at all. So yes, some things will change and others will not. A competent Linux systems administrator will be able to learn a new system very very quickly however since most of the changes are about the higher level tools used to administer the installed packages. 