I have a old MacBook Pro, from around 2013. This stable old laptop have been wonderful. Sadly support for this machine ended long time ago, so why not test something different?
I’ve used Linux on laptops at work before, and for coding and working it is ok. My machine have a Intel CPU and 8GB of memory, so modern Ubuntu should work decent. My first try failed hard, downloading the newest Ubuntu Desktop, it just gave me a black screen after booting from the usbdrive.
Well, after a lot of googling someone mentioned a legacy installer, and this did the trick. The newest version of Ubuntu with this is 23.10.1, but you can do the usual upgrade and I’m now running 25.10 on my machine.
The download link for this is https://mirror.ucu.ac.ug/ubuntu-cdimage/releases/23.10.1/release/ubuntu-23.10-desktop-legacy-amd64.iso
Good luck running Ubuntu on your old Mac 🙂