I do not believe you have to pick and choose so much between the various Dell motherboards when installing Linux. I think any of the relatively older full sized Dell 760-780 generation machines (less expensive FULL SIZED mid tower machines sporting the 305 watt power supply) are what you need for your Linux experiment.
The smaller Dell half sized case stuff is unsuitable as it gets real prickly about only being able to seat half height adder cards (and only having ONE (1) full length expansion slot on some of the small case units pared up with two of the short length slots) and
not having enough power supply to run whatever you wind up getting for a gaming video card.
It is Catch 22 crapshoot when using the smaller Dell flat case units ......
Another benefit of using the older mid-tower Dells is that you can stuff them with sticks of memory for like $13.95 shipped -- older pulled memory sticks that are DIRT CHEAP and easily gotten on Ebay.
Key thing is to get Microsoft completely off the machine so Mickey will stop fighting to own all the hard drive real estate and trying to control the drivers and such.
This 100% Linux approach also gives you a full Linux hard drive reformat of your entire hard drive, which is most conducive to no errors, no faulting,
and not requiring defragmentation or re-compression or other forms of routine Windows-style hard drive maintenance.My new Dell Win 10 machine is on pause for a couple of days while I wait for the 2 sticks making up the 4 additional gigs of memory to arrive -- then we will install the memory and go for a full boot up and find out if all the warranty voiding crap and slow start up really is just the reseller just being a lazy SOB and not initializing the hard drives properly after dropping an image on them (as Verslagen thinks).