The one killer feature I have never been able to solve with a HTPC is waking from sleep consistently.

Valve claims they have solved it at a hardware level on the Steam Machine. I'm not really in the market for another HTPC, but if I was starting from scratch I would seriously consider paying the premium for that feature alone.

For the hardware you get, it's overpriced. Go look at a prebuilt on Costco.com, for example. I see this on there right now at $1100:

Intel Core Ultra 5 225F - GeForce RTX 5060 - 32GB RAM - 1TB SSD

> Con: Since it's Linux-based I think online games with anti-cheat won't work, which seems like a significant downside in terms of utility.

EAC does work on Linux, but the dev has to set a feature flag per-game. Check the specific games you want to play.

I think if you are not in hurry it might be sensible to wait for deals on market pcs. Things are not great but there will likely be better deals if you are ready to wait and can identify right combinations of memory, cpu and gpu.

Related discussion (read the replies, too!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48635414