Linux

It cheaper alternative it RHCE. It should be able to persuade a potential employer that when they put you next to a Linuxbox the result most likely won't be an explosion. It did work for me and I got my first IT job with it, paradoxically with Red Hat. While being there I got also RHCE (both certificates are long expired now) and it was a way more practical and thorough. Whereas LFCS is much more wide (including LDAP and similar exotics if I remeber correctly), RHCE is much more deep.

As usual, you get what you pay for.

It'll really depend on your local job market. I was on a serious job hunt earlier this year and I couldn't find a single Linux job which asked for LFCS certs. There were a couple which asked for Red Hat certs though. Of course, this could be specific to where I live, so I'd recommend looking at some popular job sites for where you live (+ remote jobs too) and see how many, if any, ask for LFCS, and you'd get your answer.

Should I focus more on dev ops? Security? Straight SysAdmin?

From what I've seen so far, the days of "traditional" Linux sysadmin roles are numbered, if not long gone already - it's all mostly DevOps-y stuff. Same with traditional security, these days it's more about DevSecOps.

As a modern Linux sysadmin, the technologies you should be looking at would be Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers (Docker mainly, but also Podman/LXD), GitOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts and tools.

Some Red Hat shops may also ask for OpenShift, Ansible Tower, Satellite etc experience. IBM shops also use a lot of IBM tools such as IBM Could Paks, Multicloud Management, and AIOps/Watson etc.

And finally there's all the "cloud" stuff like AWS, Azure, GCP specific things - and they have their own terminologies that you'd need to know and understand (eg "S3", "Lambda" etc) and they have their own certs to go with it. I suspect a "cloud" cert will net you more jobs than LFCS.

So as you'd probably be thinking by now, all of the above isn't something you'd know from just using desktop Linux. Of course, desktop Linux experience is certainly useful for understanding some of the core concepts and how it all works under the hood, but unfortunately that experience alone just isn't going to cut it if you're out looking for a job.

As I mentioned before, start looking for jobs in your area/relevant to you and look at the technologies they're asking for, note down the terms which appear most frequently and the certs they're asking for, and start preparing for them. That is, assuming it's something you want to work with in the future.

Personally, I'm not a big fan all this new tech (I'm fine with Ansible and containers, but don't like the industry's dependency on proprietary techs like Docker Desktop, Amazon or Red Hat's stuff). I just wanted to work on pure Linux, with all the all standard POSIX/GNU tools and DEs that we're familiar with, but sadly those sort of jobs don't really exist anymore.

Employer here (UK)! I'm probably not normal being the MD and running Arch (actually) on my gear. I had to switch from Gentoo because I kept on burning myself.

For me, something like the LFCSA is something I respect because it is practical. Back in the day I did something similar (Novell I think). I've also grabbed a VMware ... whatever ... and that was a memory test and a waste of money. Who cares if you can quote the maximums?

When I'm hiring, I want to see application and knowledge and not a plethora of industry "quali-wankery"! You can always search for facts but knowing how to apply them is what I want to see.

Be flexible but do try to develop what sort of direction you want to take. What floats your boat out of dev ops, sysadmin etc?

You could also consider self employment/consultancy. I sort of fell into it 23 years ago ...