A shared PC for the whole family
I have been on Steam for over fifteen years. That is a long time to accumulate titles, and a big library. Plenty of co-op and couch games in there too, the kind you can hand a controller to a seven-year-old and actually enjoy together.
That is what I wanted. Not another PC for me, tucked away in the office. A machine for the living room. Something the whole family could sit down at and play, kids included. I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, and there are plenty of good PC games that work for all of us.
The wife and I are no strangers to experimentation… we have already tested streaming Hogwarts Legacy from the gaming rig to the Apple TV. It works, but not well enough. The input lag and the overall quality leave something to be desired.
Valve’s traction with the Steam Machines launching this summer gets some of the blame for my curiosity about Linux and living room PC gaming too. After all, people have been declaring “the year of Linux” for years, though with Linux hovering around 4% usage in the Steam Hardware & Software survey from May 2026, maybe this year it finally sticks. The Steam Machine will be limited in numbers and expensive, especially when imported to Norway.
Then there is the state of the current console generation. Xbox is in shambles, currently “reshaping its future”. The next generation is expected to feel a lot more like a living-room PC, but that Xbox is still years out.
So my goal was simple. Expose the whole family to Linux PC gaming, make it kid- and wife-friendly, with an experience so pleasant and easy that a four-year-old can learn to start and play games on their own.
The Steam problem
You know what kind of content lives on Steam, don’t you, you pervert. And if you do not, I do, after fifteen years. Thanks to Valve’s “no censorship” policy, there is plenty on there that is not suited for kids. While I approve of Valve’s policy of allowing all kinds of content on the platform, I am also a dad, and I need to keep my own kids away from that content.
So before any of this could happen, I had to answer one question:
Is it even possible to make Steam family friendly? Can I lock it down enough that I am comfortable handing over the controller, without hovering behind the sofa the whole time?
Honestly, I do not have the answer yet. Steam’s family management and content controls are harder to wrangle than they should be, so we will have to come back to this. It became apparent early that you have to be 13 years old to create a Steam account, and my kids are 7 and 4. So this might not pan out in a decent way. But as with many other things in life, the best way to learn is to try, experience and explore.
Even the Top Sellers list has rows hidden by content preferences. On Steam, adult games sit right in the charts, which is exactly the problem when kids are involved. / Screenshot: Steam
The PC I already had
I am not starting from nothing. I have a server PC sitting under my desk, doing duty as the home’s file and Plex server. On paper it is more than enough for this.
It is an older 10th-gen i9, 64 GB of DDR4, and a Dell OEM RTX 2080 Ti. All of it in a big Phanteks case. Plenty of power for living-room gaming. By the numbers, this machine was made for the job.
Except it was not.
That machine was built to sit in a corner and work, not to live next to a TV. It runs hot, it pulls a lot of power, it is ugly, and it is loud. Properly loud. It is the kind of box you put far away and put to work. Not something to be seen or heard.
The Phanteks case is also too big. Not something you want on display in the living room. Not exactly wife friendly, not exactly living-room friendly. Powerful enough, sure, but wrong for the room.
Powerful on paper: an older i9, 64 GB of DDR4 and a Dell OEM RTX 2080 Ti. All of it crammed into a Phanteks case far too big and loud for the living room. / Credit: kaytomas.com
Budget
A note on the total budget here. Having very little expendable income, I needed this to be as cheap as possible.
Some price benchmarks, though. The not-yet-announced Steam Machine, which I guesstimate will sell for around 15 000 NOK here in Norway (grey imports and VAT included), against the current PS5 Pro 2TB price of 10 700 NOK.
And against what I expect the next-gen consoles to cost, north of 10 000 NOK when they land.
So my budget landed between 10 000 and 15 000 NOK. That is provided I can sell the i9 PC I already have sitting underused for around 8 000 to 9 000 NOK.
For a sense of the ceiling, tek.no runs a recurring test of the best gaming PC you can build for under 20 000 NOK. Push to the very top of that range and you get a Ryzen X3D chip and a card with 16 GB of VRAM, which is seriously capable. The catch is that those builds lean on full ATX motherboards and cases, none of which fit the small, quiet HTPC I am after. An X3D chip is the dream, but too expensive for this build. Still, it makes a useful bar for the kind of hardware my money should be reaching for.
What I needed
Once I framed it that way, the brief got clearer.
I needed something small. Something quiet enough to disappear next to the TV. Something efficient, so it was not dumping heat and noise into the room every time someone wanted to play. And ideally, something that did not scream “gaming PC” sitting on the shelf.
Small, quiet, nice-looking, efficient, and easy to live with. That was my goal.
Simple enough to write down. Harder to actually build, as it turned out.
Roughly the look I am chasing: a console-style box that sits in the media cabinet like any other piece of AV kit, not a gaming tower. / Credit: Fractal
But then
I started reading and planning. I have built ITX machines before, a Fractal Node 304 way back, so I was already itching to plan a new small one. Long story short, when I built my current gaming machine, no ITX AM5 boards were available here in Norway, so that ITX itch has been itching for at least two years.
The case comes first, then the parts that fit inside it, then which of those parts run cool and quiet. I had a rough shape in my head and a budget in mind.
But then I went down the rabbit hole. And the deeper I went, the more the easy and cheap version of this build fell apart.
So here is what I am actually chasing. A small, silent, good-looking box that runs Linux, costs less than a new console, and is simple enough that a four-year-old can switch it on, play, and switch it off again. All while being kid-safe, content-wise.
This is the first post in a series where I chase exactly that, and write down every choice, every dead end and my findings along the way.
Next up is the first question you need to answer when you are building a living-room PC, a DIY Steam Machine (or HTPC), the deciding factor for everything else: the case.
