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Re: Is any benefit of UTC?
Use UTC unless you boot Windows, then use local-time instead.
The Linux kernel uses UTC for the software clock, initially assumes that the BIOS clock is also in UTC, and sets its software clock appropriately. Calculating local-time from the UTC software clock is a user-space issue, which means that the time-zone is configurable on a per-user basis – you can override the system default by setting the TZ environment variable in your login scripts (or configuring it graphically if you prefer).
Most Linux distros can cope with a local-time BIOS clock by running the hwclock command early in the boot process to recalculate the correct time, although there are corner cases where software started prior to that can get confused by the change, or leave incorrect time-stamps confusing later processes. If hwclock isn't run for some reason, e.g. due to a system error, it may make an already complicated situation more tedious to figure out... But normally it should never actually be a problem, it's just a bit of an ugly hack.
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