I own a bunch of them, generations five through ten, and have always had a love/hate relationship with them. None has ever died on me. My main workstation at home, as well as two “homelab” servers are NUCs. They Just Work<tm> under both Ubuntu and Proxmox.

The love is for them just working. The hate is for Intel :-)

What they got wrong:

• cooling. CPU cooling is finely tuned and controllable through the BIOS, no qualms there. The disk and the NVME SSD have no cooling whatsoever. Sticking an small 40mm fan to the side and running it at the minimum RPM drops the case temperature from 60°C to 40°C and avoids the NVME SSD burning out. Needless to say, a glued on fan looks fugly.
• opening. By refusing to let their firmware be accessible to the fwupdmgr mechanism, Intel forces its Linux users to physically go to the machine, stick in a USB thumbdrive, keyboard and a monitor, and click their way through the BIOS update. In contrast, my Dell gear gets updated online through fwupdmgr, and I just have to suffer a reboot with a few minutes of downtime. I don’t even have to be at the keyboard.
• remote monitoring. I bought two NUC’s with vPRO support, to allow for remote management. But the remote console sucks eggs even from a Windows management station, so I wound up disabling it on all of them. Both Dell’s iDRAC and HP’s ILO run circles around vPRO based remote management.

That’s not a lot to go wrong for such a big endeavour, which is why I will keep hating Intel and sorely missing the upgrade opportunity. Just hoping Dell will step into the void.

What do you recommend for desktops that aren’t the big ass tower?

Really depends on what you are using it for

• Internet browsing and media consumption on a big monitor? Light code development and/or office work? Just get a semi-modern laptop with USB c (preferably thunderbolt) out and a hub.
• Gaming: Honestly? The Steam Deck or one of the other vita form factor PCs are surprisingly good bang for your buck gaming wise. Same rules regarding a hub and monitors. And some gaming laptops are pretty affordable too.
• “Power user”: Build an htpc/mini-itx build and learn to hate everything about cable management

I love my big ass full sized tower. But the vast majority of computer users would be fine with a laptop and a dock/hub.

Well I’d like better cooling than a laptop, which should make it last longer. But a full size tower just doesn’t seem necessary anymore.

Again, it really depends on what you are using it for.

“Gaming laptops” are often fairly horrible for temperature control. But otherwise? Most modern laptops have performance comparable to the average desktop that has poorly applied thermal paste and was never maintenanced in its existence.

Say for modest/patient gaming.

Then yeah. Steam Deck. GDP Win whatever the hell, Aya Neo, or (if you don’t expect to ever need any customer support) the asus one.

Bang for your buck? Those rival (arguably beat if you aren’t a youtuber with a warehouse full of free parts) desktop builds, tend to have okay-ish thermals, and don’t have many battery issues when docked. And most of them double as mediocre “normal” computing experiences on top.

Well personally for me not a handheld because I still want a computer for office and things like that (and not cheap one because the more RAM the better). I’ve seen people fiddle with their steam deck but I don’t want to bother with that.