I use my steamdeck in a docking station with extra USB ports.
You can get a FLIRC or equivalent IR receiver to navigate with an old/universal remote or USB keyboard.

I load PLEX-HTPC as a non-steam game.

I also loaded Firefox for Youtube with support for uBlock and other extensions.

I use Jellyfin on the Machine a lot, what’s awesome is my TV remote is able to control SteamOS and also the Jellyfin app! HDMI CEC is a must now for me!

I also have the Youtube app with vacuumtube which works flawlessly!

That is literally what it was made to be.

I have! It’s a lot more work to set up, but once you do, the sheer degree of freedom you get is so worth it.

Tradeoffs:

• It will take hours and hours of time that you wouldn’t otherwise have to spend using a streaming box or smart TV. A lot of these apps have learning curves and things will go wrong.
• 500 GB is not enough if you’re using local files and this all depends on you having enough hard drive space during a time when that stuff is very expensive.
• Expensive, but it’s quite repairable and you can play games too.
• There are situations where you’ll really want keyboard and mouse to set stuff up, but this would probably be a living room setup and so there’ll always be some awkwardness during the most tedious parts of setup.

I’ve only had DRM problems with streaming services blocking my device very early in the Steam Deck’s lifespan, and I’ve had no issues whatsoever with that on Steam Machine.

• Web browser: How I access all my DRM streaming services, including Hulu and Paramount Plus (which are free with my ISP), Kanopy, Patreon, and Nebula. Ublock Origin Lite is installed, and all ads are being blocked without issue. I picked Vivaldi because it’s a good mix of privacy features while having speed dial built in for huge, controller-friendly icons.
• FreeTube: The app I use for YouTube videos. There are more stable apps like NewPipe and SmartTube, but FreeTube is way more customizable.
• KODI: DVD rips. Scraping metadata can be a nightmare especially for multi-episode shows if you’re on a controller setup because you need to get all the filenames exactly right. It’s better to do all the file tinkering on a separate device before transferring the files, or connect a mouse and keyboard.
• Steam Controller: The only way I’ve gotten an enjoyable living room HTPC experience since not all apps will have dpad and button support. Prior to that, I was using the touchscreen on the DualSense controller and that didn’t work nearly as well, and trying to mouse navigate with a right analog stick is awful.

I haven’t actually done much with Jellyfin yet, but someday. You can also get streaming services via emudeck, and I’ve done that and it worked okay, but it uses Google Chrome (ew) with no support for extensions and you have to set up individual controller profiles for each app.

If you have any PC around the house you can install SteamOS or Bazzite or even LinuxTV onto a USB stick, boot into it and give it a go on your TV. Most streaming services can be “installed” as a browser shortcut on the home screen if there’s no app for it.

If you see it working for you and the fam is willing to learn how to use it, buy the steam machine or a small custom pc with better specs for the same money with SteamOS or whatever you like.

i actually kind of bought one to fill this role. ive had it for a month now here are some of my thoughts

• coming from a much older mini pc used for this task, the machine is fast. i love how snappy it is in the menus

• its very plug n play, as intended. setting it up was a breeze and getting flatpaks installed via discover in the desktop mode is easy. I’d recommend getting a model with a steam controller included for these desktop apps, it makes navigation much easier with the touchpads, and community layouts are nice for specific controls an app may use. having valves support makes it much easier to be what it is, you spend a lot less time tinkering with everything and more time just doing what you intended to do in the first place.

• I’d recommend installing decky as well, it’s basically a community plugin loader for steam os thats mainly meant to be used in gaming mode and it has a few plugins to make desktop apps feel more seamless in gaming mode. for example there’s a plugin to easily add stuff to your library so it shows up in gaming mode, and a plugin to set up art for your apps so they look “polished” like games do.

• as for drm content, I think if you install a browser and use the web app version of whatever you wanna watch, you’d be able to get by drm easily. i like watching hockey games on amazon prime with brave, I know this setup is 🤢, but unfortunately brave is the only browser that has worked for this. all others ive tried including librewolf, firefox, ungoogled chromium, even normal chrome from google just dont work or dont work nearly as well. other than the hockey games I’m using vacuumtube for youtube and stremio for everything else.

• now for a con, and I dont know how much you need to weigh this, but hdmi cec controls just straight up dont work on my machine. honestly I haven’t done much troubleshooting to try to fix it but its something to be aware of if you want it, so I’m still using a separate remote for TV and receiver power and volume.

• and for any waydroid setup you might get into, when I had that on my old mini pc I ran into problems with getting video to play nicely, so I decided to just skip all that and go with native flatpaks for the machine.

hopefully this helps ya out, if you’ve got any more questions feel free to ask I’d be happy to try and answer.

I bet it’ll work perfectly. But, of course, there’s a bunch of mini PCs out there with a suitable form factor that would be compatible with SteamOS (has to be AMD only, but that’s basically the one requirement for SteamOS).

That said, I’d go for the Steam Machine given a choice, so…

You can try grayjay. Its on flathub, has youtube and nebula setup, and has built in support for controllers.

Its my dedicated TV so no family issues that I can advise on, but the Plax app I use is unavailable but available on the web so zero issues there.

Proton VPN works great with all my ahem totally legitimate sports ball watching need.

…honestly I have very little needs for a multi media box like I used to have on the Xbox, and the only major issue is that I (read: my son) can’t get the printer set up.

I’m planning to eventually do a fresh Linux install on my Machine which launches straight into Plasma Bigscreen.

Already got the multimedia situation sorted out with HDR, 4k and audio passthrough via Jellyfin MPV Shim. Now I just need to check if the Machine still gets firmware updates when launching Steam even when it is not running SteamOS.

Didn’t have time to do the setup yet but I’m planning to replace my Odroid N2+ running CoreELEC with this.

For controlling it I wanted to use my Remote 3 and/or the Steam controller.

As far as I can tell that’s the only good excuse I’ve seen to justify the price point for performance. Don’t get me wrong i want one but not because of the performance.

Essentially it has hardware to be able to turn act as a entertainment center and be turned on/off by your TV and auto switch audio devices etc. I don’t fully know what the features are because I don’t use smart TVs so I might be getting it wrong, but I know home theater nerds will buy it just for those features.

It’s mostly my primary, but I mostly only stream and play steam games with it.

My problem with the machine for thr use of multimedia is that it wasnt really designed in mind for dense storage to host media, ao youre limited to streaming unless you got 8tb ssds layong around

it seems like Waydroid can fill in a lot of the Android gaps that are missing

the only actual potential DRM app I use is Nebula

Not really sure what you’re asking. Because of DRM/Widevine pretty much all streaming apps will be unavailable. So what does an “all in one living room box” entail, in your view?