Not transferable? In the context of the most widely-used server operating system? I have transferred Unix skills for decades, from one job and project to the ne

Not transferable? In the context of the most widely-used server operating system? I have transferred Unix skills for decades, from one job and project to the next. Even Windows can run a Linux subsystem now. Having learned Unix/Linux and many of the tools myself I challenge the "requires years and years of time investment to become proficient." You missed that the knowledge and skills grow incrementally, so while you get to proficiency your skills constantly improve at the same time. You don't have to stop everything, study Unix for years, and then go back to doing something "productive" once you've memorized it all. Unix has one file format: plain text. The tools all compose around that. You can of course find exceptions -- you can't express everything in plain text -- but you can get remarkably far with simple single-purpose tools redirecting their output to the input of another tool. The core tools have more consistency than you give them credit for, describing them as hundreds of DSLs. They all have man pages, they more or less follow the same conventions with I/O and flag names. Plenty of exceptions, sure, but no more than you find in any large legacy system that has grown and adapted over time.