Used Debian and Ubuntu on Macbook Air 2015 before. In ubuntu everything works out of the box, but camera - you need to compile your own driver from github. You pay a bit in battery life and heat for having an FOSS operating system - ballpark being 5h vs 7h. Fan gets audible too compared to macos.
At some point, this macbook started to freeze with lots of % in sys in linux while doing not so much. Reinstalled macOS back, but had a problem with exactly 10s freeze the world on every wifi reconnect, totally reproducible. Took me 2-3 months to realize that there's something called SMC that could be re-set. This fixed it back, but I stayed on macos/Monterey for now.
Anything pre-T1/T2 is pretty straightforward in my experience since those models are more or less just typical x86 PCs with EFI. It used to be more hairy on T1/T2 models but from what I've heard the process on those has improved.
