I don’t work in IT/Tech at all, but I’ve been an enthusiast since I was young, at first piggybacking off of my dad, then developing my own interests as I got into high school and college. I started self-hosting because I found it interesting and as time progressed I saw the benefits of operating things locally. I only host things within my own network though, because I’m not yet comfortable with how to safely set up external access.

On the hardware from the early '00s in my collection I’ve had good results from AntiX and Q4OS.

My first was SUSE followed shortly thereafter by the initial release of Fedora Core. Lots of distro hopping and tinkering later, I run LMDE these days as my daily driver and I distro hop on the other computers in my collection.

It’s my daily driver; the benefits of mint with the stability of a Debian base.

Perhaps not as full featured as the others, but I host wiki.js for my knowledge base on my local server.

Same, flashbacks to being in college trying to get Wi-Fi working in Fedora on my laptop and then struggling to get it to work with my uni’s new Wi-Fi system. Frustrating, but a great learning experience as you said.

I use Roman authors, with the machine/VM’s purpose (often vaguely) linked to what the author was known for. For example, my NAS is called Tacitus (a historian), while my game server is called Plautus (a playwright). A couple services predate my schema (like my Pihole and OPNSense box) and are named descriptively.