I was looking for an Intel NUC 13 i5 since I have a very limited workspace at home and to my understanding Intel has a very decent quality offering and Linux support.
For now, you can still buy a $500 NUC13ANKi5 (slim, only M.2 SSDs) or NUC13ANHi5 (tall, also a 2.5" SSD/HDD) without worries.
What Intel said is that they will not launch any new models, so the future NUC with a Meteor Lake CPU must have been canceled, or perhaps sold to a partner like ASRock.
The best alternatives are from ASUS, Beelink and Minisforum.
Alternatives with lower performance, but perhaps also lower prices, are from Gigabyte, Zotac, ASRock and ASRock Industrial, and from a lot of smaller Chinese companies, which are the cheapest, but which also have more variable quality.
If your target had been an i7 Raptor Lake, then at the same price you could have bought a SFF with a much faster AMD Phoenix CPU (Ryzen 7 7840U, Ryzen 7 7840HS or Ryzen 9 7940HS).
Because you want a medium performance medium price computer, you can find at a lower price than a Raptor Lake i5, i.e. under $500, SFF computers with the Ryzen 7 7735HS CPU (Zen 3+), which are faster and which also have a much faster GPU.
Well to be honest my major concern on the ASUS, Beelink, Minisforum alternatives esp with the 7735HS is Linux compatibility and thermal management. If my setup can play well with Debian or Arch I'm sold.
The thermal management seems to have been significantly improved in many models of this year in comparison with the models from previous years, but you cannot make guesses about it without seeing a credible review.
I have not heard of any problems in Linux with the recent AMD models. While AMD still does not provide a comparable software support to Intel, at least recently the delays in providing kernel and drivers updates for their new products seem to have been reduced.
Which alternatives would people suggest?