Career Pipeline 2.0 – Building Your Linux Path

SUDO Show 73 revisits the classic “Career Pipeline” topic with a fresh panel and an updated roadmap for building a Linux and open source career today. Bill, Neal, and Noel start with the “Wayland-only” future of the Linux desktop, spotlight Red Hat’s work on fwupd and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, then dive into education, certifications, homelabs, open source contributions, and soft skills that turn curiosity into real-world tech jobs. They wrap up with a practical systemd-analyze “quick win” you can run right now to understand and improve your system’s boot performance.

Show Links:
Red Hat – Company site:
https://www.redhat.com
fwupd project:
https://fwupd.org
LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service):
https://fwupd.org/lvfs
CompTIA A+ Certification:
https://www.comptia.org/en-us/certifications/a/
AWS Certification:
https://aws.amazon.com/certification/
RHCSA Training and Certification:
https://www.redhat.com/en/services/certification/rhcsa
SUSE SCA (SLES 15):
https://www.suse.com/training/exam/sca-sles-15/
Linux Professional Institute (LPIC):
https://www.lpi.org
systemd-analyze documentation:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-analyze.html
Commands discussed:
systemd-analyze – “Odometer” (total boot time)
systemd-analyze blame – “Leaderboard” (slowest services)
systemd-analyze critical-chain – “Timeline” (dependency chain)
systemd-analyze critical-chain --system
systemd-analyze plot > boot.svg – “Visualizer” (boot chart)