I ran Xubuntu on a 2011 macbookpro I upgraded to 8gb RAM and an ssd. It runs fine, but it’s no longer good as a daily driver because the architecture doesn’t support decoding basic video codecs we take for granted to watch youtube and so on.
So it will work, but you may find web-based stuff will make the cpu spike to 90%.
That’s the one. It’s a bit daunting and I have a caldav migration to complete and some offsite backups to get done first.