As the article said, if the recruiter is at that level of box-ticking it would be a major disincentive for me as a hypothetical applicant. Generally, from the

As the article said, if the recruiter is at that level of box-ticking it would be a major disincentive for me as a hypothetical applicant. Generally, from the other side a candidate not having experience in RHEL (our bread and butter distro) isn't a deal breaker here. It's somewhat surprising if an applicant has really never used RHEL or CentOS but as you say there frankly aren't that many differences that someone intelligent can't pick up shortly. As long as there's a general knowledge of unix concepts the details of package management and where the config files happen to live isn't enough to get worked up over. What would be a red flag would be experience in only one distro, ever, even outside work.