I had Fedora and Arch on a 2012 Intel MacBook pro, it's running well, I think macos manages power consumption better, either way I believe if you have no dGPU you should be good to go, also you probably must check the Arch wiki Mac page (regardless of what disro you choose)

I am running arch on a 2011 MacBook pro. so, probably. Even if you don't plan on using arch, the wiki has all the info to get you started.

Checking in with a 2014 27” iMac. It’s still running the original 3TB Fusion Drive, and I stuffed 32gb ram in there too.

I've been doing a bit of distro hopping with it. Have run Ubuntu and Linux Mint with no issues and currently running the latest Kde Neon beautifully.

Ubuntu worked out of the box for me on my mid 2015 Macbook Pro. Don't remember any specific drawbacks, but it does take a bit of getting used to the differences. Also dual booting is possible, if you want to consider having both systems on the same laptop, good if you need Facetime or something

It’s works fine with lots of different Linux. There’s another person a week or so ago who asked just this very question. The battery lifetime is directly correlated to how many times it’s been drained and recharged, not age.

If you don’t already have a mac, I’d keep a version of macos on there. It’s useful for running native applications and you can use it to download and create boot media for old versions of the operating system to fix other macs you stumble across.

A very neat thing for multibooting different versions of macos that support the apfs file system is that they can be volumes contained inside an apfs partition. That means that if your new version and old version are each 10gb then your apfs partition only has 20gb used and both the versions will see all the free space and be able to use it.

One thing that macos inarguably does better than linux or windows is color management.

I’m speaking as a 25 year linux user: at least take the chance to learn macos. It’s a useful skill to have and it’s good operating system especially on the target hardware.

I have a 2010 running Mint LMDE, and it runs so much better than the Mac os x that it had did. The i5 is an Intel CPU, so it should be fully possible. Download a live image and boot from it. Test it out. If it works as expected, I stall. The 2010 has a screw off bottom, so I switched out the drive to preserve the original OS X, since the installation may not be available for much longer.

Edit: sorry I didn't answer the "Is there anything apple does better than linux that deserves I don’t nuke it?" question. I like to answer these types of posts as impartial as possible. Since I don't actually like Mac OS X's UI and UX, I didn't feel I could do that. I can only recommend that you as I did, and preserve the original drive if possible, so you can go back to Mac OS X if you want.

I installed Linux Mint last night on a 2011 Macbook Air. Unfortunately Debian (which was my first choice) was reproducibly crashing during downloading updates, during the installation. It also was not supporting the touchpad during installation, had to use a mouse (I'm sure it would work after installation though as it would use a newer kernel then). Mint worked without a hitch in all levels.

Yes, and with minor effort you can even make it look nearly identical to MacOS: https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme