You have a lot of incredible Macs waiting to be grabbed for cheap after Apple discontinued support.
Before converting my girlfriend’s MacBook Pro to Linux, I never thought it would be possible. I don’t know why but I thought they were some special inaccessible computers.
It’s just a shame the latest ones aren’t upgradeable. Apparently the last easily upgradeable one was the 2012 MacBook and the 2019 MacPro..not sure though..
Picked up some 'busted' laptops from a mate's work clearout (they were decommissioning a building. I also got nine pine64's and two r202s, mate got a full rack cabinet lol)
One new nvme and one disk repair later and i have a pair of vaios
I've been running Mint and Debian on old hardware too. A Macbook Air 2011 and one from 2015, and a Mac Mini 2014. Mint works great on them AS LONG AS you have at least 4 GB of RAM, especially since it can install the broadcomm wifi driver. Lots of screenshots and images from them here: https://mastodon.social/@eugenialoli/media
I just replaced the battery in my wife's 2013 mbp. macos runs like absolute shit on it, so i'm excited to flash linux. I like fedora but thinking i'll start with LDME
I have Batocera (Linux-based emulator platform) on a 2011 Mac Mini.
The only caveat is its weak integrated graphics chip that struggles to emulate fifth generation (PSX, N64, etc) and newer consoles, but since I pretty much only play 16 bit and older it's been a solid machine.
I'm currently daily driving a 2011 MacBook Pro running Arch, and it does surprisingly well. I mean, the screen is a weird resolution, the battery life sucks, and it gets very hot, but other than that ...