Well, this is from my personal experience, I suppose it depends on the person.
List prime number is nice, you "ooohhhh" for a second and then what...? waiting until you discover a new prime number...?
Writing a useful program, one I use every day, is much better in my opinion.
It's ~100 lines, easy to understand, easy to make,
and useful, besides that.
It's nor written in C, it's written in PHP, which is greatly undervalued as a general purpose scripting language (almost a drop-in replacement for perl)
Anyway, Writing (simple) useful programs did much more for me than "learning experience programs" .
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I think knowing Unix/Linux and internet technologies isn't going to help you write your game[/b]
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I think it does, for example, my rss to mail script has the following components which could be useful anywhere (including game programming):
- Storing RSS links in an "ad-hoc" ASCII database plain
- Parsing command-line arguments
- Parsing a configuration file
- Error handling (As in: Something better than "This shouldn't happen, goodbye!)
- And ofcourse the usual statements (if, for, ect)
All simple and even trivial task, but all must be learned and practiced nevertheless, I prefer doing it this way, another prefers doing it another...
This put aside, I think that general computer knowledge(unix or otherwise) is always useful when writing a program.
Simple example: Hack (and all deviates such as nethack, angband ect.) have the setuid bit set on their binaries.
Symbolic and hard links can be
very usefull in all kinds of situations.