if you want non x86 maybe https://pine64.com/product-category/pinetab/
(you have to add like 100-200$ to the price for shipping and import tax, depending on where you live)
I have lots of other hardware from them and it's solid.
I feel like people are sleeping on the Minisforum MS-R1 as a good value home server PC
Arbitrary code execution breaking sandboxes in KDE Plasma | Kimiblock's Blog
Arbitrary code execution breaking sandboxes in KDE Plasma | Kimiblock's Blog
I Put a Datacenter GPU in My Gaming PC for £200
Don't do any nieche distros.
Use one of the top ones by user amount, that way it's less hassle (lots of users prove that stuff works well) and easier to get help (cause larger community).
For gaming a "rolling" distro is recommended to get the most up to date software and bugfixes.
My recommendation is (in order, best to good) cachy, fedora kde or bazzite.
Do not use "stable" distros for gaming like debian or ubuntu or mint. Those do a major release once a year and you will sit on bugs ir compatability issues that are already fixed on other distros. Stable means they don't update often.