I did most of my PhD on that machine, including tons of coding. With a nice window manager, it's doable. A higher resolution 16:10 screen would improve the experience, though.

It was Linus Torvalds daily driver for some time. I also wiped out OS X and went with Linux, deployed directly as an EFISTUB so no bootloader. Being all-Intel, sans a mediocre Broadcom wireless card, the machine had perfect Linux compatibility.