I have a Dell R740xd that is the core of my home lab, with 384 GB of DDR4 ECC. That was by far the most expensive part of the server. I get a lot of use out of it, but it certainly contributes to a higher-than-average power bill. I'm working on solar at some point next year.
I feel the same way. I don't like or dislike Stallman, and certainly disagree with him on a lot of stuff, but I can appreciate what he stands for and for GNU in general.
I don't know enough about Github or Microsoft to say anything intelligent, but I agree with your sentiment in general. And, one thing is for sure - I have used Github for years, pushing many thousands of commits on personal, private projects. I've burned through as many free action minutes as I can, and I use my own action runners as well. I've done this all for free, so on balance I am grateful for them.
I have a Mac Studio M2 Max as my main driver. It's fantastic. I will get the best M5 Studio I can afford when the higher RAM options come out because I am very involved with local inference. I find that with Tailscale I can either use screen sharing if I've got a good enough internet connection or just SSH and Mosh if it's a little bit laggy. That has been good enough for me. A Mac Studio and a Neo as a companion is a really good combination. My laptop is an Apple M4 Air but it basically does nothing except for running ScreenShare and a terminal.
You can run GLM 5.2 at a reasonable quant on a cluster of DGX Sparks. On the link below, the guy is getting decent performance and links to a repo. An 8x Spark cluster can run it even better. A Spark cluster is about as good as it gets for (a) runnable at home, (b) "affordable" hardware, (c) not going to kill your power bill.
