I'm not the OP but have a little collection of mini pcs (5 of them) so, if you'll allow me, I'll comment on why I have them...
The form factor is very convenient, two of them are my mother and my wife's "desktop" pcs - they're both attached to their monitors and, with wireless keyboards and mice they stay discreet and don't take up a lot of room but are very good desktops for daily email reading, recipe browsing and facebooking. My mother and wife don't complain about them - they're more interested in the the compact size and staying out of the way than the performance.
Two of them are small servers that I run stuff that my Raspberry Pis can't handle (I still don't have a Pi 5, WAY too expensive around here) - quick, low noise and isn't too power hungry. Runs linux perfectly and I never have a problem with software (the n100 is a great little CPU). I have 2 because of some weird sale on Aliexpress - 2 for the price of 1-and-a-half was something I couldn't pass up on.
The final one is attached to our main TV, it's a converted TV box (running Armbian) that's an amazingly powerful piece of cheap hardware. It's our main movie viewer (off of our DLNA NAS) it can hand 1080p video just fine on a crappy 5V power supply.
If NASA can't contact it again and it has bravely gone into the great darkness alone with a piece of us, let's hope it's eventually found by a race capable of understanding the fragment of memory it carries.
We just swapped out our old webmail system (made from twigs, mud and spit) for a nice and elegant Roundcube install with custom plugins and I was already dreading having to change it.
There was one of these about IT that made my mind melt - I understood all the words but it didn't make sense and I kinda mentally blanked out to the point I don't even remember what it was (but I'm sure it was on youtube as I saw it on Cytu.be).
I watched it a few times but then it just vanished and I never found it again.
I talked with him briefly some 20+ years ago and he showed me his laptop with Free software. As I was younger back then I found it quaint but as I sit here and realize I'm doing something in the same vein, doing things thanks to a mountain of Free software.
As I am prone to do when I'm brought back to that moment where I was just chatting with the RMS, I smile and wonder how many other dumb college compsci kids were exposed to a different kind of way of doing things that basically changed their lives.