The reason why I was curious is that I am running my stuff on a Strix Halo and I get the feeling that this class of devices ( gmktek, minisforum, lenovo, etc. ) seem to becoming a pretty good alternative

Unified memory feels like the future of consumer hardware, agreed! Do check out r/StrixHalo

Agreed, it was a bit of a pain to get running on my Ubuntu machine because I had old amdgpu-dkms-firmware packages installed without realizing it. But now that it's running it's amazing how well it works

Sounds like you got it sorted, but more generally this may be interesting: https://github.com/kyuz0/amd-strix-halo-toolboxes

Strix Halo is better performance than a Mac Mini, but not as good as a Mac Studio. But the 128GB unified memory is awesome for larger models.