Dont bother trying a mini PC as a Steam OS Box

I'm a huge fan of SteamOS and the Steam Deck.   This is just perfect as a portable game system,  but I want my games progress to also be on the console in my living room.   Yes I know I can buy a dock,  but 720p gaming on a 90 inch screen  just sucks.   I wanted at least 1080p, so I went down the road of the SteamBox and found 2 things.

1 - the only ISO to use is ChimeraOS, https://chimeraos.org/   the rest are all dumpster fires of unmaintained or something broken. Nobora and Bazzite both have problems with AMD video card drivers.  both did not even try to use the video chipset and were massively worse. HoloISO is dead and buried with even the fork being out of date it also had issues.  it would never let my bluetooth xbox controller  reconnect automatically.

Chimera is the only one that gave me a complete clean SteamDeck like experience.

2 - not a single "tiny pc" has enough power to really game on.

You need a half way decent video card,  AMD  at least a RX580 GTR or higher. and at least a 7th gen i7   oh and an SSD helps a lot in load times.

Do not even think any of these mini pc's or the old NUC8 hades canyon you can game on.   you just cant.  Their claims that it can do VR are 100% bull crap.   I have one,  the processor is fine and speedy.  It's the garbage mobile chipset that is causing the problems. Radeon RX Vega M or the Vega 8 or any of them are just hot garbage and that is what every single one of these mini pc's use for the claimed "video card chipset"   even at 1080p on low settings palworld chugs at 7-14fps.  processor is happy as a clam as the 4 cores are more than enough but the video chipset is pegged and you can watch the temps soar along with the fans kicking in hard.  I decided to be insane and see how Apex Legends ran... It's not bad, but again 720p and low settings on everything.  lag is enough that you are nothing but free kills for other players.

Even dropping it back down to 720p makes it run crappier than the steam deck.  and at that point I might as well plug the steam deck in.    

Moral of the story,  you need to build your SteamBox as a PC with an itx board and use a decent AMD gaming video card that is from a gen or two ago.

I now have a couple of mini PC's that I guess I can find another use for.   So do not waste your money, Do not try and make a steam Box out of these mini pc's.