It also helps if you are an experienced Unix sysadmin.....
True, but putting it on your system helps you learn it as well. Nothing makes you learn better than immersion.
So does knowing the chipset of the motherboard and peripherals, but Linux does a bloody grand job of detecting them automatically in most cases.
Ha! Sure does.
My father-in-law has had two XP desktops for years...one for home one for his business.
He emailed me yesterday saying that he discovered a whole mess of new stuff comes up when you accidentally right click on an icon. He JUST discovered the concept of the context menu in Winders and I'm going to teach him about sudo? Grub? VMs? No frakkin' way.