Fedora

Well, I used Mandrake (now Mandriva) for a year and learned absolutely zip... I had to force myself to dive into the deep end to get anywhere.

I don't see any recommendations for learning on a Unix system. You can if you want. It is easy to find and buy an old Solaris servers from eBay. I would recommend the Sun Fire V245 or the Sun Fire T2000. Both should come with a DVD, disk drives and memory. If you don't get everything upfront it can be hard to make the server work.

The downside for Unix is that it can be harder to get new software for Unix and the hardware is mostly RISC based. Although Sun does have Intel based servers. They are just more expensive.

IMHO, I see Unix dying over the next decade. Although there will likely be someone using it. There is a steel mill near where I live that still uses Digital Equipment Corp Alphas and possibly VAXes even though DEC went away in the mid 90's.

There is OpenSolaris these days, which runs on consumer PC's.

There is also good old-fashioned BSD, as free as it always was. We've heard that one before.

The last time I looked at installing BSD, it had to be installed on a primary partition. Is that still the case?

Unix is being kept around so people will appreciate Linux.

Isnt openSolaris EOL?
AS in, no longer beeing worked on?

I mean, Solaris 11 is quoteing an article of 2008., on heise.de
The OpenIndiana project has its last article (frontpage) refering to Solaris 11, on 10th August 2013

And oracle is announcing Solaris server 11 for the cloud since a week.
So either they are late, or all the internet was ages ahead of Oracle.

An on Oracle Solaris previously known as Open Solaris Linux - Linux Freedom the screenshot of Solaris is from 2008.
To me it gives the taste that the open one was droped in favor of the enterprise (payed subscription??) version.
But then again, i'm not into the Solaris stuff at all.

Cheers

Oracle did something fairly heinous and they had to fork it. It's called Illumos now, I think.