Wait for the Steam Machine pricing announcement. After that, make your choice.

But if will come down to:

Convenience & Console level Specs

Versus

Hard work & High end Specs

That said,

If you have an old PC or laptop you can use to start getting cozy with Linux, you can flash a USB drive with Aurora if you want a preview of what Desktop mode is like on Steam OS or Bazzite.

There are a few questions you need to answer that impact the specs.

What resolution will you be using for your monitor, 1080p or 2k or 4k. If you are 1080p gaming then you really do not need the latest and greatest.

Do you want to pay extra for a “future proofed” machine. I think buying future proof is a meme the stuff lasts so long especially on linux.

Do you want to pay extra for a smaller case and smaller parts.

What games do you want to play? Sim games require a decent CPU everything else you can get away with the lowest end CPU and its fine. 5500 5600 and 5600x are solid value AM4 cpus. If you have money for future proofing you can look at am5 CPUs.

For gpu ifyou are 2k or 4k gaming 9070XT is the best value card on the market right now.

For 1080p the 3060 or 3060it is a solid card at a solid price. Dont worry about nvidia compat its fine. It takes a single line pasted into the terminal to get the drivers and most distros have a GUI tool to get them if you dont want to do that.

As for distro it really doesnt matter, they all use mostly the same tools and software. Bazzite, fedora, Ubuntu are good places to start. If you want a “gaming” OS, cachyOS, nobara, pika have been optimised.

For specs that are important, if you need WiFi its nice to get a motherboard that has WiFi on it. Nvme ssd drive 1tb or 2tb is really nice.

Consider picking parts and building it yourself you will learn about how it goes together and fixing it will be much easier. You’ll also have a lot more freedom for customisation and part pricing. I had a friend who is not technical at all build a PC and he said it was quite easy he just followed a video from linus tech tips. Took a few hours.

If you can wait 3-4 months Valve’s Steam Machine is on the horizon. Depending on the prize that might be a good bargain.

But in the end it really depends on your budget. Excluding monitor, keyboard and mouse you can pay anything between 500 and 5000 dollars.

The AMD rx 9060 xt 16gb GPU looks good.

Then choose whether you want DDR4 or DDR5 RAM, and based on that pick choose a modern Ryzen CPU. For a CPU cooler, I recommend something by Arctic. For example, I got the Arctic Freezer 34 eSports DUO used (because used is basically as good as new but way cheaper).

For motherboard company, I would avoid ASUS because of the recent security vulnerabilities. Maybe try ASRock, as they are budget friendly and aren’t lacking. Really anything is fine as long as your CPU fits the slot (and so already should your RAM if you choose a CPU compatible with the right version).

Get an NVME SSD with at least 1 TB of spacs and a HDD for extra, slower storage. You can find some good deals on here: https://diskprices.com/

Get a case that can fit your graphics card and CPU cooler. Also should have space in the front and back to channel wires

Use an online power supply calculator to figure what wattage of PSU you need for your parts. You should get a PSU that is Gold or Platinum rated and prefer ably modular wires.

What are some must have specs in you opinion to run most modern games

There are none. Choose the best ones to fit your budget.

would you have a #1 recommend for a prebuilt to get started with?

I don’t really recommend prebuilts. If you look up reviews most of them are just awful. But iBuyPower seems to have a decent reputation. The Steam Machine will be available sometime next year but its a relatively underpowered machine built for the living room. Not sure what your budget looks like or how you plan to play but that could be a good option. However it should be noted that it’s not upgradable. I’ve saved buckets of money by upgrading my PC over the last 20 years.

As for distros, there is obviously no “best”. The most commonly recommended one for beginners is Linux Mint. I recommend Zorin. If you want the best possible gaming performance, you could go with Cachy. It’s also available with Steam’s “Game Mode”, which will give you that handheld/living room experience.

1. I have a 4-core CPU, 16GB of RAM, and 4GB of VRAM. Nowadays you’ll want at least a 6-core CPU, 32GB of RAM, and 8GB of VRAM. What I have works for me though if you’re on a budget.

2. I don’t know prebuilts, and I doubt many people here do either.

3. CachyOS (Arch-based) is good but requires you use the terminal to do a lot of things. Mint (Ubuntu-based) is basically all GUI so it’s good but I haven’t tried gaming on it and it doesn’t yet have Wayland. The most important thing is just to use Steam really, Steam does everything for you.

Building a PC right now is not the best idea, RAM and storage prices have increased a lot (in the US) anyway. And I agree with the comment that pretty built aren’t the best option either. My friends who have got pre Built’s have both had issues with them. Alternatively, steam just announced their new steam machine which will be based on their steam OS and I believe will have a normal linux desktop environment like the steam deck does. As for distro, I use and recommend linux mint. It’s designed very similar to windows and you don’t need to access the terminal as often as some other distros. I have an Nvidia 4070 and it works perfectly fine with mint.

For a heavy duty gaming PC that you want to last many years without having to touch hardware again, I’d recommend 32GB RAM and most definitely go nvme SSD drives (not SATA). No spinning rust drives unless you have a specific use case for media or archive storage.

As far as the cpu and video card, unless you plan to heavily get into ray tracing in games or play with (gag) “AI”, AMD will be great for both.

I’d recommend Mint or PopOS for a starter distribution. I do not recommend Bazzite to newbies because an immutable distro adds another level of learning concepts you don’t need at the beginning.

People have been recommending bazzite for newbies who want to game. I haven’t tries it but have found PopOS to be very easy and stable. Pop does simplify nvidia support as well but I run an AMD GPU for the reasons you mentioned.

Just make it easy on yourself: start with using a Fedora LiveUSB just to try out the different desktops.

Gnome is more like MacOS KDE is more like Windows

I’d just try those out first until you’re more familiar with things. All distros are pretty much the same as far as features go under the hood, and you won’t see a massive gaming difference on any of them.

Sticking with AMD hardware is the right move if you’re gaming. Steer clear of unbranded machines you can’t easily check compatibility on as you may end up with unknown hardware without proper driver compatibility. Some top gaming brands that make an effort to be Linux compatible:

• MSI
• Framework
• System76
• Dell (only the enterprise stuff)

You’ll probably only find good deals on the MSI stuff in the upcoming sales, but maybe the Framework refurbished store online will have some desktops. System76 rarely has sales, and are a bit overpriced in IMO.

If you build your own, just stick with MSI and AMD. You can probably build a solid gaming rig for $750-ish.

Most of your indies on Steam will run on anything remotely modern, even integrated graphics. AMD is easier. RAM costs more than you’d think nowadays but I would still get at minimum 16gigs. Any decent AMD video card will play most AAA’s that are on Steam at 1080p, and I find Steam doesn’t want to ever do 4k anyway, but maybe that’s a quirk of my setup. I’d also get more HDD space than you think you need, ever more games are like 200GB fully installed.

Imo must have specs include SSD (2 TB preferred), and at least 16 GB RAM, but more is better. Also a decent GPU. I still do okay with my old RX 580 but sometimes run into issues and need to turn down settings to get better fps.

I know there are distros meant for newbs and distros meant for gaming, but if you’re just starting honestly I would go mainstream with a Debian or Ubuntu, so you can easily get support from others who have asked the same questions.

Debian stable is rock solid and while it might not have all the latest versions of everything in the default repos, it will NOT break. Ever. I’ve ran it for about a decade now on various machines no issues. I did manage to also get steam and VR working with Debian, but iirc while steam itself is easy and mostly out of the box, the VR needed some installation.

Ubuntu is mainstream but has Snap and snap sucks, but it will also have easy to find solutions if you search for help. But I’ve also ran into problems with snap versions of programs and tools having odd problems.

My daily driver for gaming had been Archlinux for 7 years, but that broke a few times. Do NOT recommend for newbs as the install was also very manual. Right now I’m on Garuda and have been for probably 4-ish years. If you grab the right installer it actually has a very newb friendly install, but it is Arch -based so while I view it as easy, and I’ve had no issues whatsoever in those 4 years, I’m reluctant to recommend it for a first distro right off the bat.

So if I were you, I’d start with a distro like Ubuntu or Debian stable, do the stock install but pay attention to what it says about partitioning at the beginning. If it offers to put /home on its own partition, select that, make it as large as reasonable (1/2 to 3/4 disk size). After you get comfortable with your Ubuntu or Debian, then learn about partitioning and look into distro hopping and dual booting. Keep a LiveUSB on hand just in case you break your bootloader, never hurts to have one or more recovery USBs.