First, a bit about my background.. I currently work as a Network Engineer, mainly with Cisco routers/switches and VPN devices. I am thoroughly familiar with Windows, both as a workstation and server, and have one more test to go to complete my MCSE. However, I have no real experience with Linux, and feel like this is both a hole in my personal knowledge and in my resume. 🙂 I can do basic user stuff both from a command line and in Xwindows, but have no real command of it.

That said, I intend to rectify this. I want to start using Linux as my primary operating system on my personal PC, as I feel this is a great first step to really force myself to learn it. I need to know what distribution would be best for me to use. My concern is some of them seem to have a lot of proprietary tools that are not found in other linux distros, I want to find one to learn on that will best allow me to be comfortable on any linux distro I run into in the future. Thanks much for your advice!