Just over a year ago I bought a 5950x on sale and with the help of some spare parts, and some great second hand deals I put together a Proxmox machine and began self hosting some services. 1 year later I have 4 Proxmox nodes; a 5900x system in the Rosewill rackmount case and 2 Beelink mini pc's.
I recently bought the Startech rack from a small business that no longer needed it. It came with 3 shelves, 2 APC rack-mount UPS's, one of which had brand new batteries, an HP Proliant DL6360 Gen 8 (not pictured, haven't made use of it) and a QNAP rack-mount something or other with 5 x 2TB drives in it. All for less than the price of the rack brand new.
Throw in a couple raspberry pi's, one that's running PiKVM hooked up to a 4 input HDMI switch, and one I use as my bastion host / jumpbox, and you got yourself a homelab!
I was entering my teens in the early 2000's. My memory is terrible but my family got a pentium 3 desktop PC and I remember I had some versions of SuSE, Ubuntu and Mandrake (or was it Mandriva by then) on that PC at one time or another. My family never knew how to use it because it was different all the time. Heck I didn't know how to use it.
When I built my first PC, a pentium 4, I dual booted windows and some flavour of Linux for a time, but I got into PC gaming so I only casually checked out new releases of Ubuntu over the years. Once Proton arrived though it was finally time to make the switch.
I'm not a developer, I made a pong clone with python once because I wanted to learn for the sake of it, but I support a few projects financially that I enjoy, I try to submit bug reports best I can. For the most part the community is great, and yes I use Arch btw.