Why?

Neither Stallman (GNU creator) or Torvalds (Linux creator) use them.

From an admin/dev's point of view it's usually either Debian or Red Hat.

That's exactly the purpose. Mainly managing server roles for corporate needs, so i want to be confidant that irrespective of type of linux server they have i should be able to manage them. I've heard somewhere, cant remember where, that (mostly) US companies use RHEL, European companies use SUSE and Indian companies use Ubuntu as their preferred servers. Don't know how much truth in it. So that's why i wanted to be sure about CentOS/openSUSE/Debian.

What is mixed architecture? installing x86 packages in x86_64 and vice versa?

Good advice. Thanks

lib32 vs multiarch

This wasn't true in the past and certainly isn't true after the Novell take-over.

While it's impossible to give exact numbers, Debian is by far the most used system in quantity and Red Hat has always been the biggest "pay/commercial" system.

I think other points were good exposed here and there's no need to talk about these again so I will show mine.

I've been using Kubuntu(ubuntu with kde) for almost 8 years on my desktop, and 4 years on my laptop and love that, It's an amazing distro and you hardly will find your self without a package for a program you want, large compatibility of hardware drivers, and has a lot of configuration tools for beginners and people who don't want to loose time doing unecessary things, but was always a pain in the ass when I tried to upgrade my system to newer releases and always broke my entire system, video drivers don't work, programs dependencies broken without an good and not painfull way to fix, and days trying to fix the whole system, and even after that, still don't work well as before, then I reinstall from CD/DVD. until last version, 12.10.
That is what happens with any ubuntu variant, kubuntu, lubuntu, xubunto and more... on most cases, and I'm not talking only about me, but every one I know on my university.
For that reason I changed for archlinux on my desktop, and that was amazing distro, and fedora on my laptop, becouse my knowledge on centOS and his similarity.
Since then I have no problems in upgrade my systems to newer releases(on Fedora, because on arch, i'm always updated), and when rarely it happens it's too much easier to fix.

If you need or want yours systems to be always on the latest releases and packages(without the work of manualy download and compile, when it's compatible with your system release), and you don't want to spend 3 days fixing bugs and loosing time on your system every release upgrade and after that, I don't think (?)ubuntu is your best choice.

I'm talking this because if you realy want to be a linux user and don't want to migrating between diferent distros, what I think is a good thing for beginners to learn about then, you should consider this point on your choice.

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Holy Cow!!! Debian is around 38 GB big in size. Kiss goodbye to debian local repo!!

i guess DVD-1 is all i need.

If you have a good internet connection, the netinstall disk is a great option.

Yes.

Typically 32-bit programs installed in x86_64 Linux will use .so files with the same name as .so files used by your 64 bit programs. So you need to have two different .so files with the same name, both in standard locations.

The way that is managed is different between the Red Hat family and the Debian family.

There is no vice versa. You can't use x86_64 programs in a 32-bit x86 Linux.

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in debian

Debian is only 38Gigs if you install all of the packages, which I doubt you will be needing all of them.

i was thinking if i could setup Debian local repository for experimental corporate environment as i did for CentOS, which has only 2 DVDs. i cant afford to download 10 DVDs. i'll download just 1st DVD and stick with learning other server roles.

You only need to download Dvd -1or you can download net-install or cd-1.
The only time you download a full set is if you don't have internet connection or a slow connection. All of thr pscksges that are available on the Dvd are available for download thru package manager.

Well, they install all software as-is, as it's meant-to-be by their respective authors. Especially Arch is doing just that. They don't add layer-over-layer of self-baked implementations for numerous things, so what you get after an installation is pretty "vanilla" and represents a GNU/Linux system more than other distros.

Why? Well, Arch (and i suppose Slackware also, at least to some degree), follows the KISS principle, which recommends to keep everything simple, thus making everything less complex & therefor easier to maintain.

Does it matter if certain celebrities use them? Certainly not. I couldn't care less which distro they personally prefer, as it's their decision, not mine. I was just pointing out that Arch/Slackware are the most "unmodified" distros which give you a good picture of what GNU/Linux is all about.

And yes, as i also stated, Debian and it's offsprings are by far the most widely used distros both on servers and desktops, so from an admin's point of view it certainly won't hurt to get used to those distros as it's likely that an admin would stumble upon one of those sooner or later.

CentOS is also relatively wide-spread on the server market, which is basically a free edition of RHEL, so it would cover RedHat as well as - partially - Fedora if you learn a bit about CentOS, too.

If your plan is to diversify your experience for many different scenarios, then you're going to need to try out a lot of distros.

I would start with Debian and Ubuntu, since that seems to be where you don't have as much experience yet. While they both are similar, they both have significant differences, and both metal-as-a-service and JuJu (in Ubuntu) would be worthwhile to learn about if you're ever employed by companies that have fetishes for corporate buzzwords like "big data" or "cloud computing" (*gag*) or you otherwise need to use OpenStack (since both MAAS and JuJu are designed for running private clouds in a way that allows for quite a bit of scalability).

Once you have that down pat, I'd look into Slackware and give yourself a crash-course on how to harness the power of Linux shell scripting to do your bidding. That's probably a biased suggestion, with me being a Slackware user and all, but installing and configuring Slackware really is a great way to dive into Linux fundamentals (as well as Unix in general, Slackware being advertised as the "most Unix-like" distro; at the very least, you won't get as much heckling from the BSD fanboys ).

Sure, current Slackware admins are probably quite self-sufficient *now*, but they'll have to retire *someday* (at least until we discover immortality), and when that happens, it's much better to be able to swoop in with knowledge of the existing system than to propose overhauling it with something more familiar merely because you have no experience in it. Since Slackware is pretty generic in terms of its configuration, knowing it will make understanding other more-generic distros (Arch, Gentoo, OpenWRT, etc.) - as well as even the popular distros - much easier in the long run, while not completely overwhelming you in the process.

Just my two cents, though. YMMV

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Thank you all for your great inputs. so i'll start with Debian for now which i hope will be good for my career. i'll also try Slackware for better understanding of Linux.