Have to agree here. I get a lot of benefits professionally from running Linux personally. I've been a full time desktop linux user over 10 years, and I'm often considered the "linux wizard" because I'm known for SSHing into servers and fixing obscure errors that others have looked at for hours with no success. My secret, is that I've run into most of the common problems (filesystem permission issues, including ACLs, selinux, low memory/OOM, conflicting dependency versions, etc) before and already mostly know how to fix them. The time I did on Arch was particularly helpful here. It was a hard first week or so but I learned more about linux during that two weeks than any other time.

Anyway the reasons I say that: These days I only run distros locally that I would run in production. I get intimately familiar with the intricacies of the distro that way and managing the servers comes natural to me because of that.