Hey all, I'm fixin to switch to a nix only os, and forget windows alltogether. The more I read about Linux, it seems its only a child to Unix, which seems to be the mac daddy of all Os's, right?
So my question is, should I just switch to Unix, I know it would be hard, but it seems to be able to do everything, and with online access to help I should never really get stuck and not be able to learn more right?

Linux is a clone of Unix. There are free versions of Unix (*BSD, Solaris) but I'd say the majority of the open source support is for Linux so if it were me I'd recommend doing Linux unless you had a specific niche that required one of the others. Most of the Unix commands have analogs in Linux and most of those even have more options than the original Unix command they were based on.

The above assumes you're doing this for your own use and not for business Production critical stuff. If it is the latter depending on the complexity of your need you'd probably want to consider a commercial Unix (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris) and pay for support from their prospective vendors. As you can imagine that can be quite expensive (especially since it runs on proprietary hardware). There are commercially supported versions of Linux (Suse, Redhat EL/AS) as well.

Before you ask which is best - just remember asking which is best is like asking which religion is the true one. You'll get a thousand answers and none of them will agree.

Lol yeah there is no "best". But wouldnt Unix sorta be like win98 and linux win95? I have teh impression that since Linux is based off Unix, that Unix would be bigger badder etc..
I do wana learn it to start learning alot more about computing, I'm a student and am still considering going into the technology sector

Commercial UNIX is typically "bigger" and "badder" than Linux only because it is mainly run on RISC technology on large systems designed for enterprise level computing. However there are commercial versions (SCO for example) designed to run on x86 systems (PCs/desktops). Linux is mainly designed for x86 but has variants that run on RISC and other chipsets as well. (In fact though I run HP-UX on most of my HP PA-RISC systems I do run Debian Linux on an HP PA-RISC workstation just so I'd have it to play with.) Companies like IBM actively push Linux on some of their enterprise stuff.

I believe you'll learn much more experimenting with an open source product like Linux than you will on a proprietary Unix system. Once you know one flavor of Linux or Unix it really does transfer a lot to other flavors (most of the day to day commands are the same). The differences come in the administrative commands, utilities and setup but these differences exist between variants of Unix as well so learning one Unix doesn't put you any further ahead of the game for getting up to speed on the next.

The main reason I'd suggest you focus on Linux is because it has a huge community of people willing to help you with almost anything for free. Though there are forums for most of the Unix variants some of the really key stuff you'd like access too is only available from the vendors along with paid support contracts. On Linux if you're geek enough you can get down to the source code and rewrite programs that don't suit your needs as is.

Hey Mandrake just finished downloading Thanks for the advise guys!