Hey ylancantho,
your are in a Netwareforum where hardly anybody will tell you "stay out of Netware", of course not.
Nevertheless:
A competent admin will seek for the OS which serves best for your purposes, for your customers needs and for a reasonable price. If you have users that love to work and hate to wait, Netware always has been a good choice. If they will turn to Linux, they wont give up their goodies of Netware. It will rather be a soft migration as we have seen it in Mac OSX, except you are a developper.
So check out, what's the purpose to learn about any IT-System.
We currently migrate Win-Servers to UNIX for a global carmaker who is desperately lost with his Win-machines in running several Oracle-Databaseinstances on each machine. If they hadn't dropped Netware they wouldn't know this problems.
Netware is reliable and compared to UNIX/Linux much easier to manage with its native standardtools; Merging the Linux-Netware-stuff seems to me pretty charming from the Applications point of view.
As someoneelse in the forum already stated
Linux for development
Netware to serve
Apple for productivity
Windows for solitaire and to be served, patched,
"REALTIMEPROTECTED", rebootet, reinstalled,
memoryupgraded ...
Rudi