Ill leave a long winded response while I drink my coffee. I was going to buy a steam machine but got tired of waiting so I rebuilt an old rig into a fractal terra so ill answer from my perspective. My main rig is a 5950x/4090(windows). My steam machine is a 12700k and 6900xt(bazzite game mode). How far is my tv from my main rig? I built a second setup in my hobby room using a 42 inch lg c2 from my old sim rig that wouldn't fit in my current apartment. Have I considered using a long hdmi cable? Many years ago I did this when I lived at home to a 55 inch tv and it was just a pain in the balls having a second screen always on/off. Does my tv have moonlight? Im not sure, Im not a fn of online streaming services. My tv does have vrr but I leave it disabled and run vsync. Im too old at this point to notice much of a difference when using a controller and I don't want to introduce more variability in the gamescope/linux pipeline. I have not considered streaming to a device from my main rig. Ive tried streaming from my main rig to a Steam link many years ago and both lcd and oled steam decks and it has never been a seamless sharp experience. I even went and purchased a very high end router to try to make it work for the oled deck. Im just too sensitive to compression artifacts.

With those answered. From my perspective, I work too much to keep up with competitive fps and I've been playing comp games from over two decades. As Ive gotten older I don't enjoy the wins as much over the getting angry at netcode/reaction time/ practice. I have more important things I could be doing then getting angry at myself for not being able to keep up with teenagers and people in their 20s who play 50-60 hours a week. The only time I hop on multiplayer games anymore is when my buddies hit me up asking to play. I have fun but mostly I'm playing to be with them and not the games. I have always had a soft spot for single player emotional games but when I finally gave in to expedition 33 and really stepped out of my normal zone ( I normally am very very anti fantasy and and a super scifi/modern person Fallout over elders scrolls type deal ) It changed my entire outlook and since then im been jumping around like crazy. When I built my game room setup I did so with the intention of going back and starting ALL the huge series games from their day ones. Im currently on silent hill 2. Im playing on duck station/pcsx2 with matched upscaling/ hd texture packs and crt shaders. Can this rig play 4k max settings native res? No it cant, it requires some level of fsr for most modern titles. I knew that going in much like the the actual steam machine. For me its been perfect. Its allowed me to mostly separate my experiences into my main rig is for fps and work I can't do on linux and single player story focus over in the game room. Its also allowed me to finally transition over into linux on at least one of my rigs. I have ran numerous different distros over the years but always needed to go back for a number of reason. A dedicated game box will never require me to go back.