Sadly the vast majority of ARM vendors offer only very old ARM cores. Except for the chips intended for mobile phones, the only devices with not too old ARM cores are slow devices with quadruple Cortex-A55 cores.
I fear that Asahi Linux on a Mac Mini (especially when the M1X comes out with possibly 6 or 8 high-performance cores) is going to be the best option for a modern Linux ARM workstation for a while.
The largest hurdles in these sorts of projects tend to the GPU and video codecs.
I wish them luck and hope they succeed in entirety, but I can only early adopt so many things. Hopefully Apple doesn't reinvent their GPU every single year.
I fear that Asahi Linux on a Mac Mini (especially when the M1X comes out with possibly 6 or 8 high-performance cores) is going to be the best option for a modern Linux ARM workstation for a while.