Today I took my first baby step into the #homelab world! Got a used HP ProDesk 405 G4 (my first AMD machine!) with Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” on it, from our local nonprofit Free Geek 
https://www.freegeek.org
I’ve only 1) built 1 desktop (bought a case + all the components then put them together like LEGOs) 10+ years ago and 2) assembled my Framework 13 in 2023, so it’s all quite intimidating, but this video was so clear and jargon-free that I’d recommend it for all newbies: https://youtu.be/FnB12C4Npus
@agnes nice! What do you plan to host? What operating systems are you looking at?
@distributed Thank you, I’m excited! 
I’m planning to simply follow Matt’s example and try TrueNAS + NextCloud so I can get the hang of using a headless machine, and also run AdGuard if possible. But I’m hoping to pick up a few more things to upgrade the memory and storage first, so I’m currently going down that rabbit hole.
@agnes down the line, you should check out #Proxmox, a virtualization environment that allows you to install different containers and VMs all on the same machine! You don't need to do that first as it has some added complexities like needing to pass-through hardware. There's a bunch of tutorials on YouTube about it though.
Have fun tinkering!! I've ran servers like these for around 15 years, and I don't think I'll ever be done playing around with it