I run arch linux on my ancient macbook pro 2011. The reason I installed this flavor of linux was to disable a faulty gpu, and the guidance I found was using this distro. This mac has been my all-day-every-day workhorse ever since. And as for linux, with i3 window manager it is fantastic. It runs all the latest things I need for programming and it runs them fast. I almost never boot into mac at all anymore.