Well, for starters, if you build it you can have whatever aesthetic you want.
That's kinda the point, I can't really have any aesthetic I want. Unless I CNC my own case, I'm limited to what case manufacturers sell, which, in my opinion, is mostly bland boxes. or even worse, some sort of an LED aquarium that the components have to live in.
Depending on your performance target, some RTX3050 cards will run entirely off of the 75W provided through the PCI slot. They’ll also have “office PCs” with graphics cards in them, meaning they’re technically fit for playing games even though they’re bot marketed as such.
The thing is I'm not really set on any performance target yet. It might seem like I want to have my cake and eat it too, and I probably do, but I just want to know that I could put whatever I want into the case and not be limited by some proprietary standard.
I have a similar device, made around 2013, Atom CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, 32 gig emmc drive, no exandability.
I run Arch with QTile on it without much of a problem, though as others have mentioned, web browsing would be a pain with more than a few tabs open. Youtube is a no-go too.
I currently use it mostly to test an image editing GUI im working on. I know that if it is snappy on such poor hardware it would work perfectly fine anywhere else.