Only thing you need to look out for when buying components is what the Linux support looks like. I've built 3 desktops in the last couple of years and all of them work out of the box. It really doesn't "require" forum diving.
A Dell XPS 13 developer edition with ubuntu preinstalled hasn't worked "out of the box" for simple multi monitor usecases for me. Invariably something requires an update for support that invalidates some assumption and then whoops the only guide that describes your problem has a solution that involves pulling and compiling X.org in a terminal and dealing with tarballs.
And someone can go gosh, you must be doing it wrong, and they're almost certainly correct! However I'm a pretty big power user and can actually get things to work and dig into forums, so I realize that the average user has absolutely no chance.
