Asus and Lenovo both make a handheld gaming device that competes with the Steamdeck now. Though the Orange Pi Neo looks like an interesting entrant. Manjaro is pretty similar to the Steamdeck OS, which Valve has failed to release for other hardware (they said they were going to). In fact, Manjaro is what Valve recommends to developers looking to test their games ona "steamdeck like" OS if they don't have a Steamdeck.

> Asus and Lenovo both make a handheld gaming device that competes with the Steamdeck now.

They both run Windows natively, though; that should place them in an slightly different market.

you'd actually be surprised how much competition there seems to be in the chinese SBC gaming space

it's mostly emulation, though (see https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/)

I recently went down this rabbit hole. I bought a controller and mount for playing emulated games on my phone and then started seeing references to various handheld emulation devices. The amount of options from $50-200 is insane and I think my kids will love one of the switch-like devices that can play a ton of retro games.

I've also recently fallen into (reading/watching about) it, and from what I've seen, some of them have really impressive levels of community software support

e.g. https://onionui.github.io

For playing Windows games, mostly.