To be fair, $600 for 64GB of RAM is a steal in this economy (you could probably sell the RAM alone for $800). So if you want that much RAM and are ok with the rest of the system - go for it. I mostly wanted to point out why I personally would not like such a machine (why I’m “sleeping” on it).

Mine was the equivalent of $660 at the time with 32GB of RAM (excl. HDDs). In this RAMpocalypse it would probably cost around $1k.

I am interested in trying out an Arm/RISC-V PC for a Linux server. However, what stops me from buying almost all of them is that they require you to use a dubious, poorly-maintained manufacturer fork of some Linux distro.I don’t want my hardware to become e-waste when the manufacturer looses interest in 10 months, so running an upstream distro (like Fedora/Debian/NixOS) is a hard requirement for me. It seems that they half-solved that issue for this machine, so that’s actually good progress.

For this particular machine, Jeff Geerling also reported that the idle power draw is 17W. That’s higher than my faster, fully-upgradable mATX AM5 x86 NAS…

Debian also supports “unattended-upgrades”: https://wiki.debian.org/PeriodicUpdates

I actually have it set up the same way on both: Automatically install updates (and restart some services), but don’t reboot. I don’t think it was different/easier on Ubuntu.

Overall, the two distros are very similar for a server application. If you’re already running Debian on your PC, I would also go with that for a server.

I guess 3ms would not be noticeable to most people.

It would be interesting to see how this behaves at lower refresh rates. Loosing the same 1 or 2 frames at 60/144 Hz should be noticeable.

It’s clear that you’re making some trade-offs with a 1000 EUR gaming PC in the current memory shortage.

What looks nice about Mifcom is that they give you 3 years of warranty, use standard components, show you what they are, and allow you to change those. But, indeed the PSU looks very cheap and I have never personally ordered from them.

With Tuxedo you certainly gain better Linux (Tuxedo OS) support, but they’re also rather expensive.

And even that one with its mediocre CPU is still more expensive than the Cube.

Keep in mind that the Steam Machine roughly has the CPU performance of a Ryzen 5 3600, so a 8400F should actually be quite a bit faster.

I filtered for the 9060 XT on Galaxus and got about 20 results below 1k EUR, e.g. this one for 844: https://www.galaxus.de/de/s1/producttype/pc-18?filter=347%3D7709265&so=5. But it seems that Galaxus mis-labeled the GPU, and it’s the non-XT version 👎 This one for 899 EUR actually seems to have the XT though: https://www.galaxus.de/de/s1/product/kiebel-viper-v-1000-gb-16-gb-amd-ryzen-5-5500-radeon-rx-9060-xt-pc-69216705

I also linked a Mifcom machine in another post, this is the German equivalent for 900 EUR: https://www.mifcom.de/entry-gaming-pc-ryzen-5-8400f-rx-9060-id186 But, this also comes with the non-XT version and selecting the 9060 XT 8 GB pushes it to 1059 EUR.

Edit: I guess the RX 9060 non-XT should still be quite a bit faster than the Steam Machine though, it’s just bad if the retailers (and me) mix them up.

Beating the price point of the Steam Cube is almost impossible if bought new, even full diy systems have a hard time unless using used parts.

A regular pre-built with a 9060 XT 8GB can be had for about 10% less than the Steam Machine (900 Euro). That will be quite a bit faster and also upgradeable. The main advantage of the Steam Machine is the form factor and power consumption.

I would go for a pre-built computer with an RX 9060 XT (preferably with 16 GB VRAM). That GPU will run loops around a Steam machine. You can get such a pre-built for around 1000 CHF:

• https://www.mifcom.ch/entry-gaming-pc-ryzen-5-8400f-rx-9060-id186?configurator (about 1k with the 16GB version).
• https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/producttype/pc-18?filterGrid=expanded&filter=347%3D7709265%2C9648%3D16000000000_13&so=5

Interesting. To me, they both offer a desktop experience (panel, start menu, tray icons, windows, tiling, virtual desktops, …) that captures all the things I liked about the windows interface. What sets them apart for you? I get the wish for Mint KDE though, would be nice :)

If you’re looking for Mint with KDE Plasma, Kubuntu should be a fine choice. I would also not overthink it too much, it’s quite easy to tune things (e.g. remove snaps on Ubuntu) or switch distro afterwards. Mint, Kubuntu, and Fedora all allow you to play around and find out what you like (and dislike).

In my experience it works with some games but doesn’t with others. And if it breaks, the game just stops without any error message/information (you can get some info on the terminal). I would avoid it if at all possible. NTFS support is also overall still rather poor (e.g. my Mint install recently stopped working with NTFS drive until I ran chkdsk on Windows).

I think most distros would work for that usecase. I would recommend Linux Mint, Fedora (although Nvidia drivers are more annoying there), or (K)Ubuntu. Have a look at desktop environments too, as they are very important for your experience. Some of the major ones are Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, and Gnome. Mint works best with Cinnamon, Fedora and Ubuntu let you choose which ISO you want to download.