I’ve never owned a decent gaming machine, for various reasons. Cost was a big factor. Another was the fact that I was never a big “gamer”. Very little desire to play the big, popular, AAA games in general. The games I did play, I played on a very old PC, and the performance was what you’d expect from low end hardware; but I just never had any desire to build my own gaming rig.
The Steam Deck is perfect for my use case:
I have no desire to run Windows
I have no desire to build my own gaming machine
I have no desire to get locked into a console ecosystem (Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, etc).
I can play handled, docked to a monitor with keyboard and mouse, docked to a monitor with a controller, docked to a TV, etc etc
I can play games built for Windows
I can play games with native Linux builds
I can play Steam games, Epic games, DRM-free games, emulated games, etc, etc
I can do whatever the hell else I want to do with it. For example, maybe I might want to run Kodi on it, and connect to my Jellyfin server at home to watch a movie if I’m staying at a hotel. Whatever. It’s just a computer like any other. I can do whatever I want.
I think I’ve probably played more new (to me) games since buying my SD than in all the years (decades) previous, and I love it.