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.
If that was true the steam deck would have already done it.
Steam deck hasn’t sold that many devices compared to PlayStation, switch, or xbox. Wildly successful for what it is? Yes. Was it ever going to become a significant % of all gaming consoles? No.
Steam Deck is held back by the perception of mobile gaming. Many don’t know how powerful it is, so it competes with the Switch more than PS5.
Well and even then it revolutionized gaming on Linux somewhat. We are now at over 90% playable games, while a few years back we scratched at the 50% mark.