Cheap mini PCs have indeed gotten good but many of them come preloaded with malware, at least every one that was preloaded with Windows that I bought off Amazon. It's just muscle memory to image the machine with Linux or Windows depending on my intended use. That removes the proprietary RGB software which some have had luck replacing with OpenRGB but I just unplug the disco lights. The newer AMI BIOS is getting worse in my opinion including the 2024 version removing the configurable boot delay was not cool since newer keyboards take longer to initialize forcing me to remove all storage to get into the BIOS configuration. On the other hand some of the newer mini PCs have two or four NVME slots now and that is a big plus for me personally. They just need a little more room for bigger heat sinks and better air flow.
I was also looking at these to clear some space on my desk, but they're not really good for gaming. You're limited to "integrated graphics" which is still second-tier compared to a separate GPU chip.
You can drive a dGPU/eGPU on many of these either over USB/TB or breaking out PCIe directly.
(That said, the featured chip runs many recent games fine on high/1080)
I wonder if there would be a perf increase on the Mac minis if they ran OrbStack instead of Docker?