> Have you ever tried to build and maintain a shuttle PC yourself? It's obnoxious.

The benefit of a SFF PC you made yourself it that it doesn’t use proprietary hardware like the Steam Machine, is easily repaired and easily upgraded.

This is very true. I had a Ryzen Mini PC up until a couple of months ago, when it broke. Low quality VRMs, needed board repair.

Support says I need custom molds to reapply the liquid metal thermal compound, or it would 100% leak. Regular thermal compound just isn’t good enough. It was true. I could send it to China and they would fix it for free, but it would take 60 days and I would have to pay tariffs.

I just cut my losses and harvested the RAM and SSD for something more dependable.

Exactly. This is going to be perfect for my kid as he enters his teenage years. I dont want to mess with building one for him.

Let's hope his friends don't try to drag him into any competitive mainstream games. Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC, … Kernel-level anti-cheat usually doesn't work on Linux.

Let's hope Valorant, Call of Duty, Battlefield, EA Sports FC and others who explicitly deny their anti cheat from working on Linux react to the increasing demand for gaming on Linux, and begin supporting anti cheat on Linux.

Also, if his friends play Halo, CS2, Ark, War Thunder, Arma, Hell let Loose, Splitgate, TF2, DOTA, Overwatch, or The Finals, he'll be fine.

If you want to maintain the PC (replace or upgrade parts) the Steam Machine seems like a worse choice over a mini-ITX build. The price for the two is comparable.

If you want a console I agree, it's expensive but you can leverage your existing library and use sales, so not too bad if you buy a lot of games.