Linux certification - most recognised?

slinxy · Sunday at 19:48

Hi... bored... just re-sat/done all of my Apple management and security certs and I'm looking for a distraction before they make me resit my actual Apple operating system certs and I'm thinking of getting some Linux certs on my CV.

looking online it's seems the most recognised are the CompTIA Linux+, which would go nicely with my other CompTIA certs then the Redhat certs. We use RHEL at work and I would prefer to get a Debian based certs, but I can understand why industry would tend to use RHEL more.

Does any one have any certs in Linux, what's people's experience in/with them? are they worth doing the training for?

Throrik · Sunday at 23:37

CompTIA is trash and has been for many, many years. The only reason they still exist is US Government mandates for some bizarre reason.

Your options are Redhat, LPIC and LCFS for the most part. RHCSA is still a great cert - regardless of if you want something 'debian-focused' pretty much the only real difference is the package type and the package manager for the most part. Honestly I would still say Redhats are still the best - they're much more broken down now after the RHCSA, and the RHCE is pretty much purely based around Ansible now but they're still perf-based and lab based.

Personally never bothered with Certs, unless work are forking out they don't do anything in my personal opinion, interviewed far too many people with certs coming out of their eyeballs who don't know the basics to have much in the way of a positive opinion overall.

opethdisciple · Monday at 00:43

If I'm not mistaken the Red Hat stuff is the gold standard in the industry for Linux certs.

But what do you need them for?

I think the Linux system administrator role will be a dieing off job these days with cloud and now AI.

You only need general system admin skills these days to get by and most of the things are in the cloud.

You'd probably be better off getting your hands dirty with Kubernetes.

What's your goal?

Are you trying to break in to the industry?

I can tell you what's happening where I work. Everything is going multi agentic. In other words we won't even be vibe coding any more and instead building AI agents that talk to each other each with it's own speciality and they will do the work amongst themselves.

I dont even know what my job will look like soon. As everything will be automated . I will just do Jira tickets. And even that will be automated soon as well.

Throrik · Monday at 01:04

opethdisciple said:
You'd probably be better off getting your hands dirty with Kubernetes.

Funnily enough this statement is quite interesting to me. I am not a huge fan of kubernetes but work with it a lot - 99% of kubernetes engineers can't do basic linux skills, it is absolutely fundamental to understanding all of these technologies. Recommending kubernetes without a core understand of linux is like telling someone to fly a f15 as their first plane. It keeps me in a job nicely though, because I am good with both.

Also strongly disagree with Linux 'sysadmin' dying off. Changing yes, but that's been the case for the last 20 years.

slinxy · Monday at 06:35

I’m not really looking for a career change, just something on my cv to show that I have Linux admin skills, in case I ever need it in the future. I pretty much use it everyday at home and at work.. and have supported servers in past role.

There maybe a new team opening up at a work to support desktop Linux if we make it into an offering beyond servers. If so; I may be interested in an engineer role within that team… or at least use it as leverage against my current team.

Ice Tea · Monday at 07:01

Isn't it all moving towards integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and hybrid cloud management certifications?

opethdisciple · Monday at 12:30

Throrik said:
Funnily enough this statement is quite interesting to me. I am not a huge fan of kubernetes but work with it a lot - 99% of kubernetes engineers can't do basic linux skills, it is absolutely fundamental to understanding all of these technologies. Recommending kubernetes without a core understand of linux is like telling someone to fly a f15 as their first plane. It keeps me in a job nicely though, because I am good with both.

Also strongly disagree with Linux 'sysadmin' dying off. Changing yes, but that's been the case for the last 20 years.

I shouldn't have to qualify this statement but I will.

I'm not implying you learn Kubernetes in isolation because that is silly. Kubernetes is built on so may other things like Linux skills, docker, etc etc... But by focusing on Kubernetes you learn the other stuff as well.

These days you do not need to go deep in to Linux to get by. I've done both the RHCSA and RHCSE and the level of stuff in both those courses you don't need any more. (In general. Unless of course you work in a data center which is a different ball game.)

These days you don't need much more than package management and managing services skills and how to look at logs and even that is going the way of the dodo because companies are migrating away from traditional servers and more towards contains, serverless.

And now with ai agents even that will be not necessary anymore either.

Things you can pickup in 30mins.

If someone wants just to learn I would suggest something like this:

RHCSA. Not because you need the full skill set, but because it's a good curriculum.

Learn python or go. Always good to learn about of computer science and coding.

After that one can do a Kubernetes course or a cloud course etc etc...

---

I helped a friend's son get his first job when he was starting out from zero experience with the advice above. It even shocked me how effective it was.

He basically just did the RHCSA and started doing some python, next thing I know he's father tells me he's got a job.... I was shocked.

Throrik · Monday at 13:06

You obviously work somewhere that is either very specifically cloud-forward in terms of something like EKS/AKS or don't have a complex environment. Linux skills even in cloud are one of the biggest gaps in the industry. Thankfully that keeps me well paid and my job secure. A significant amount of the stuff I do AI mostly hallucinates commands that don't work or get's it wrong enough that it becomes mostly useless for anything other than the very basics. Troubleshooting an ETCD DB compacting issue a few days ago and if we'd followed Claude's awful recommendation I'd have had a bad day. Containers/Serverless are just Linux behind the scenes, I support IaaS/PaaS so I look after the infra behind the scenes where all the DevOps/Platform guys don't have a scooby after they've run their helm charts and their terraforms.

Regardless it's all moot - the OP mentioned supporting Desktop Linux - I would say that's a very different kettle of fish, zero point in learning the ever-growing-complexity-tree that is Kubernetes there. I think RHCSA or LPIC both cover everything that would be needed there - but the guess is you'd be either having RHEL, SuSE or Ubuntu there so be worth engaging with them for desktop training as that's a bit different.