Technically I believe the answer is no - I don't believe you can create a 3rd party steamlink-clone.
"Steamlink" vs "steamboxes"
Afaik Steamlink is not the same as the SteamBoxes - the steamboxes essentially run a more or less a standard linux desktop with steam starting into bigpicture mode, ther ear quite a lot of pre-built ones on the market soon, and you can download that OS yourself and install it on anything you like.
Steamlink is a much more stripped down version of that, more an appliance than a normal distro, which is only able to run on THAT hardware.
Point is, if you buy a steamlink you buy something slightly different than when you build/buy any SteamBox steamos - namely you buy reliability (iOS on iPhone vs Android on any thing) and performance relative to price.
Building vs not
I don't know what one could buy that would run steamOS and would then perform the same as a steamlink, for the same price - I'd be interested in knowing too, though - if I concider price/perfomance for a rapsberry pi I'd be kinda amazed.. might be totally wrong though.
@anyone: Can you buy hardware for that little money that could just run windows + steam and just be done with it that way?
In the end, there is a linux system in your house
Another implication of SteamOS (especially when building that system yourself) is that you are then running a (however tiny) linux machine - there are good steamos first-timer guides out there, but in the end you have to be willing to dive into the linux stuff at some point at least a bit.
And, just from my personal perspective: I am a sysadmin for all kinds of linux servers, whole lot of them, for more than 10 years now. I have an Intel NUC for XBMC and SteamBigPicture running kodibuntu, I believe.
It normally works perfectly fine, as seen in the movies.
But it took some bartering to get the OS on there in the first place, and then every couple of months something linux-y goes wrong, and I have to do something to fix it.
Consoles exist for a reason
I can do whatever to fix it, and maybe you can just as well, but my point about this is that this really pisses you off with about the second time this happens to you on friday night when you sit down to "just play something" and then you have to go into a half hour+ long debugging session until you can watch a movie/play a game.
With the steamlink you buy a console - it glitches out and you reboot, if there is a bug they can fix it nad everyon e else experiences the same bug, so they ostensibly will.
With building it yourself you ostensibly just build a full linux system that just runs steam in a streamlined way which you have to maintain same as your laptop/pc.
Shitty Wifi vs Shitty Wifi-reviewers?
The steamlink has 802.11ac spec wifi, and that is because the data rates required for streaming games with them still looking good are rather large.
The very few steamlink reviews I've read did never include a good description of what the wifi situation was, and if issues where mentioned I didn't see any testing "can my wifi even do the required throughput, for here to there".
So, it might be that the steamlink actually ships with a shitty wifi chip, or batches with shitty chips, then more or less everyone/large cluster of people would have that issue.
Or it could be that the reviews you read where badly done, and left it at "well when I connected via wifi it looked worse than when wired, so steamlink wifi bad" - the only thing that that would reliably tell you is that the reviewer did not do his job properly and/or doesn't understand wifi enough to be able to write a good review on that specific part.
Solution?
Go back and check the reviews, I'd say, check if they give actual numbers, or just a throwaway "wifi doesnt work well".
My hones guess would be that (unless the chips are essentially broken as described above, or you have some magical laptop) there should not be a difference in any way to your laptop.
Fun thing is you can actually test that out - go to a gamestop, buy a steamlink, try it out, bring it back if it doesn't work as desired.
You could also try out power line adapters to simply create a wired connection to your steamlink, if it's wifi chip actually is the problem - depending on how keen you are on having to learn linux to some small-is extent down the line and deal with the occasional friday night kernel panic (exaggerating, but still), it might still be very worth it to you to spend a little more on being able to use the steamlink instead of building yourself.
Disclaimer
I tend to write long and rambly. I tend to over-explain. Please don't feel "explained at", if you don't care/already knew, maybe someone else does/didn't - I tend to end up writing for them as well.. 😉
But besides the actual point.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram