Red Hat is an enterprise OS - there's a corporation behind it so it works very, very well.
But, it's not free. (I got it from a book that I mentioned earlier in the thread - Mark Sorbel's Practical Guide to Red Hat.) Fedora is the early but stable beta of Red Hat. It is free but will have some bugs But, it will also have features that Red Hat doesn't.
And then there is CentOS.
This is the one that I recommend. CentOS = Red Hat - proprietary images.
CentOS is great and a new distro typically comes out 3 to 6 months after a new Red Hat distro. And, of course, CentOS is free. A nice advantage to this one is that all of the literature for Red Hat works exactly the same, and there are a lot of good books and tuts, how-tos, etc for Red Hat.
Unlike Windows, you don't need a GUI for linux. Everything can be done with the CLI.
Anything you can do in Dos, you can do in linux. Seriously. I'm sure I mentioned this before, but in the beginning, there was the almighty UNIX, and all was good.
But, then someone wanted to make money by controlling access to the code, so they were hired by IBM to create a proprietary operating system. This was Bill Gates and his little start-up called MicroSoft. He would take the UNIX and backwards engineer some of it and emulate other bits, but ignore lots of it. He would change slightly some of the command names to keep from being sued by AT&T. Eventually, Steve Jobs little company called Apple would introduce a GUI built on top of the CLI in such a way that the user never need look at the CLI again. Then for years MicroSoft and Apple war over who can do what with the GUI and eventually claiming to be very different, we arrive at the present day with GUIs that are 99% the same in their functionality.
Meanwhile, a couple of decades earlier, a young man by the name of Linus Torvald, takes a look at the now open-sourced UNIX and writes his own kernel and calls it linux. He also open sources and future users will recreate the GUI of MicroSoft and Apple, but will also continue to develop the CLI to be more like UNIX.
So, there you have it. If you install CentOS, you can choose to do it in 'text mode' and always work in a command line environment.
As for the directory stucture of linux, it's the same as UNIX. Really the only difference from MS is that it's a logical anchored system (root) versus a physical anchored system (c
. That and it uses slashes that go the other way.
