My son is turning 9 and has been using his computer more and more. he has my old System76 wild dog from 2010, which is a great computer, but is way past the end of its life. He mostly plays minecraft and browser games, though he is doing more artistic stuff in gimp and even a bit of cad for our 3d printer or in blockbench.
We’re looking at a System76 Meerkat for him. For most things I think it would be a huge upgrade, but it is NOT a gaming computer. That being said, his requirements are slim. He mostly plays Switch or on the tablet for “gaming” and I think if it ever came down to it, we could explore things like external GPU’s. He’s not even on steam yet.
The Meerkat can use Intel UHD graphics, or Iris Xe graphics depending on the CPU. I would like some subjective feedback on if those are workable for a kid’s computer, the specs are here (we’d probably go 12th gen CPU): https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat#specs
I’m having a good time even on an 11th gen mobile Intel processor with its iGPU. For more demanding games I use FSR to get much more bang for buck from the iGPU, on Linux it’s pretty easy to activate in almost any game. On a side note, Waydroid (with libhoudini) also has excellent performance on this setup.