Agreed. My vendor of choice is Newegg. For things like motherboards I'll look at the reviews searching keywords Mint, Ubuntu, Linux. Odds are someone has made a pro or con statement. Never hurts to ask questions in this forum as well. Doing so helped me opt for a SSD which I use for my root partition of which I'm quite pleased with.
As a general statement I select my parts that are 6-12 months minimum behind state of the art. Any new machine should feel wonderful replacing one several years of age. Money saved on the motherboard/cpu selection can then be applied to a decent power supply as well as additional memory.