I don’t quite understand the criticism. It’s not gonna be top of the line, but it’s more than enough to replace my dying laptop from 2015 that I pretty much only ever use like a desktop anyway. And I can save myself the time and effort of picking parts, building, and dealing with shit not working as expected.
I can dual boot my Steam Deck with an external Windows 11 SSD. I expect I can do the same with the Steam Machine.
But why would you?
Maybe to play games that you can’t play on Linux.
A) to see if it could be done.
B) I wanted to see if/how Destiny 2 runs on Steam Deck and it requires Windows. Running it in a compatability later gets you banned.