Let's do some real thinking here
Certification is not the panacea for all computing problems. After all one can only get MS certified from MS authorized testing centers for the MS operating systems. Why is this any different than RHCP/RHCE? Look Linux is a kernel, and GNU/Linux is the operating system which meets the needs of many individuals, organizations, and companies. It is really to the OS world what TCP/IP was to the networking world. Linux is workable, quite powerful, timely, and available to a wide audience today. What will it be in the future? This is an unknown quantitiy. But difficulties in configuration regardless of topic (security, performance, reliability, embedded spaces, etc.) are not specific to any operating system. If you go from AIX to NT toSolaris to Linux to BeOS to MacOS even things will get easier over time for each one of these. What is really being discussed here is contextual learning. If you learn Linux first then the Windows paradigm makes no sense. If you learn Mac first then the Windows paradigm seems like a nightmareish Mac environment. Similarly, if you start in the Windows world and move into the UNIX space things just do not make sense. In essence no one paradigm is really better than the other for the general purpose operating system. After all people can get used to anything green screens, BSOD, application crash, you name it an people have adapted thier work ethos to it. So my statement here is that all of this holy crap over one OS being better than the other is just that holy crap.
That being said what is important? Well I would say the promise of Open Source Software is important. It means returning control to those people who want control. Some people do not want to be in control. Theywant to shirk responsibility. It is easy to stand behind a company and say, well they don't yet support this feature, or they don't yet have this security flaw fixed. It is not s
