That is not true. Arch, Fedora, Debian are all capable of supporting the hardware specs of a 3 year old MBP. It depends a lot more on the experience you want

That is not true. Arch, Fedora, Debian are all capable of supporting the hardware specs of a 3 year old MBP. It depends a lot more on the experience you want with your system. Do you want KDE or Gnome? Or something more sleek like openbox? (openbox with Cairo-dock can almost be used as a drop in mac clone) With KDE out of the box it usually will setup basic two finger scrolling and mouse gestures for the track pad. I would just put linux mint on your mac book and call it done. It will support your hardware and you'll appreciate the form factor more.