Unequivocally yes. As a developer having an identical setup on my local machine that I do on my server saves so much time. Besides none of the commercial OS's have a package manager that comes close to the package managers on linux / bsd.
I don't think identical setup on local and remote machines is the solution. Something like Vagrant + a provisioner (Ansible, Chef Solo, just a bash script) is miles better in my experience. And is not host OS dependent, you can run your dev VM on Mac or Windows too.
I agree about the package manager. Using a workstation without a proper package manager is a bit annoying once you get used to pacman/apt/yum.