I dont think thats making a dent in their marketing budget. Also judging by the replies they do actually reach their target audience.

So far it seems they know where to find their target audience just not what they actually want.

The most common reason ppl buy rackmount gear for the homelab is for training on enterprise equipment and because they find it dirt cheap on ebay. That is despite the noise and running costs.

They said they wanted to build a pickup truck. They ended up with an industrial excavator 😅.

Regular homelabbers dont buy racks and use 15 bays. In the day of 18Tb shucked drives who needs that many bays??

This whole thing is weird especially since people like geerlingguy and the self hosted people promoting it. I mean those guys use raspberry pi 4s for most of their own stuff?!

Os choice is driven by your needs rather than any ideological mantra.

If your programs run under linux then go for it. I made good experiences with ubuntu. It simply works on my desktop. Gaming works. Most devtools work even better. Browser works too. Streaming is meh. So you can save a buck with the lower bitrate.

Whats holding people back is windows specific software that runs poorly under proton and wine. Like autodesk stuff.

If you figure out your usecases then you can evaluate it its worth switching.