I'd much rather buy a 5 year old mini Dell (or Nuc or whatever) that I can reliably put Linux on than some kind of one-off thing like this.

Call me cynical after being burned countless times on niche-ass platforms. Even my Framework 13" has a flurry of issues I've never seen on more mainstream hardware. Life is too short to worry about bizarre firmware issues in hardware that no one is paid to support.

There's plenty of reason to be conservative and that's a solid recommendation. My own i5-8600t nuc continues to tick away!

I for one am delighted that you can buy a modern-ish high performance, advanced processing node based system, that's small, that has such incredible capabilities, that's super power efficient. And that finally it runs a mean Linux!