It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.
And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that’s an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.
And for electric I suspect it’s pretty low. I’m running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.
I see you got your answer, but I’m adding on for anyone else that comes across this.
For me, I learned the most when I had a disposable and replaceable system. When I was dual booted I was too scared to touch anything in case it fucked everything up. Once I started poking round on a Pi, LiveUSB, etc it was a lot easier to learn because I could always restart.
Id start there with something like Mint or Ubuntu. Then set it up in a way where you can easily replace your OS so you can reset it often and fuck around. Then just learn as you go.