I am not a complete Linux newbie, nor can I say I am an experienced user. I have a couple of questions that I would like to have answered.

First off, please understand that I am not looking to start a flame war, just get some rational insight into what I find rather masochistic, and that is the installation, use and management of the perceived "expert" Linux distros, namely arch-based, gentoo, and their like.

First question: Do the companies that frequently hire employees with Linux experience primarily use these distros, or does a comprehensive knowledge of Linux in general suffice?

Second: Do the Linux-proficient employees of such companies spend all of their workday performing the sort of "god-mode" tasks in Linux that require the level of patience and affinity for pain required to run these distros at home? Or is Linux merely the incumbent operating system at the place, and the employees are doing tasks such as program-writing, web development, etc.?

I'm only asking because I perceive Linux or Windows as I would a cabinet shop or a laboratory; that is, as the place where I do my work, and not the work itself. If I aspire to be a web or software developer, or a DBA, then I want the OS to be transparent, and facilitate the tools of my trade to work for me, i.e. text/code editor/WYSIWYG software, FTP client, etc.

In other words, the extra time it would take for me to master arch or LFS could be spent mastering my craft/trade, but only if less demanding distros like debian or SUSE are common in the aforementioned workplaces.

Thanks in advance for all helpful comments.

Shane

No.
Understanding Red Hat and Debian system administration is usually enough.
As for those "god-mode" tasks, you normally script/automate those and be done with it forever (well ...almost).

Whatever you use at home is irrelevant (I 'm posting this from a GNU/Hurd system).

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I use gentoo. Once learned, it terrificly supports long-time-maintenance of own changes and merging with upstream changes. Not only config changes, but source code changes on patch level. In my case, this means firefox's internal css files which exist only at build time, a small change in celestia wrt highres earth textures, digikam's zooming behavior, an older avidemux version because the new version is bitchy.

You never ever reinstall gentoo, except for incompatible platform changes like x86 to x86_64. My experience with Ubuntu's major-version-upgrades have not been the best, although Ubuntu LTS within a major version is very good. I explicitly want a rolling-release-distribution, and I think I have gained time and peace of mind with the well-documented-minor-rolling updates, instead of reinstalling-and-reconfiguring or upgrading-and-repairing every 1 to 4 years. Gentoo's compile time is not in that equation, of course. I do not need to watch the compile process.

Two questions in one. First: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SLES/SLED and Ubuntu are far mor frequent than the "nerd" distros. Second: Maybe not strictly required in a job interview, experience with the "pain machines" ;-) might earn you bonus points because it shows you can work your way through documentation and through not-out-of-the-box maintenance tasks.

Most certainly not. Companies have better things to do. Recurring tasks can be automated of course.

If you are in doubt to try LFS, don't do it. LFS is for people who really want to learn the internals of an operating system.

But arch is another category. If you want a rolling-release system which you never reinstall, it might be for you. I never tried it.

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cepheus11 - that was an outstanding response to my question. Thanks very much!

Shane

People who work on Linux systems fall into pretty much the same categories as people who work on Windows systems. From those who just run applications on the OS, to those who write scripts and perform administrative tasks to those who design whole data centres.
You learn what you need to to get the job done.

I'm not an expert, I don't want to be an expert, and I have no desire to manage servers. I use Arch because I can. I spent a lot of time learning how to use it and knowledge is perishable. I also use it because is flexible I don't need to add ppa's and I don't need to add lots of repo's. I really don't spend that much time maintaining my system I built it I know what's installed and I don't really need to worry. What I do like about the Ubuntu world is I can go look for stuff in the SW center to try here I have to trawl the net to find it.

I forgot to add that when I read the title of this thread I thought it would be moaning about how annoying Debian or Ubuntu are, not the less complex, but more difficult to work with, source-based type distros.