Cheapest is to fit within someone's free tier (e.g. Oracle), but I'm leery of that. Personally I use Hetzner's cheapest US instance which is 5 EUR/month with an IPv4 address.

I'm on mainline Fedora on a Thinkpad Z13 (Gen 1). Sleep works unless I connect or disconnect a thunderbolt device while the machine is sleeping (which hard crashes the system); I would say it's noticeably more reliable than Windows. Power consumption is still poor in all states - usable, but generally worse than under Windows and pathetic compared to a Macbook.

The examples on your site are impressive, but I'm having trouble getting good results on HF - it's generating a lot of near-silence (often nothing but) and when it does produce speech it bears no resemblance to the audio prompt and only produces parts of the text prompt. Would you suggest any adjustments to the default parameters to improve adherence, or might I expect better results running locally? Thanks!

I definitely noticed that effect (it's late here as well) - I found it necessary for the last couple to look at the center of the triangle rather than each dot in turn.