Some of the stuff I do at work requires VMware, so I figured having a Linux OS computer would also give me some more familiarity with it.
Honestly? Find something to do with it. Just installing Linux and trying to use it as a desktop will teach you a bit, but mostly you'll just figure out that you're trying to use a dump truck as a running around car, and while it does the job, it's not actually a good fit for purpose. Set it up as a file server or media center or something with a purpose where you'll actually have to trouble shoot shit. FreeNas and Xbox are good starting points. Or grab a free/pirated hypervisor and run up a VMware instance on it and do something with it - mock up a server environment or something. But make sure you set it up to actually do something with shit that can go wrong or where you'll find stuff you want to do that in any obvious and have to figure it out. If you run up a hypevisor - once you've figured out shit on Ubuntu or whatever, try Debian and just do the same shit. Then try centos and opensuse. Just to get your head around the small but incredibly significant distro differences. Most of all, if your goal is to learn? Live and breath the cli. Ideally remotely. If you're using a mouse for anything, try and figure out how to do it from the cli. The figure out how to do it from the cli on another machine.
I have less than zero knowledge than most people on Ubuntu, however it was free and I wanted to learn some basic shit on a OS, that said it is a very cool system to learn on. But fuck me if it isn't hard to stick with it when I had to do like 30 steps to set up a media server when it took me less than 4 on a Windows system. It's fun to mess with but I opted for ease of use.