Nope. Too soon for that

I guess PopOS performs like vanilla mint or like Ubuntu. NixOS feels very snappy even on Gnome on a 8gb machine from bloody 2012

No idea… a real bummer but I am grateful I could not get it to run smoothly as it pushed me to eventually land on NixOS

I guess there is just less bloat running in NixOS. But then again, the difference between Debian and NixOS is very subtle. Debian/LMDE run great on that hardware

It was updated before wiping yes. Those macs are abandonware, they stopped receiving firmware update a while ago. Followed no guide, the install wizard was very easy. All components worked out of the box

Totally wiped, yes

Fedora might run well but LMDE will 100%

did not test with classic Mint but LMDE has been rock solid with WiFi

none my dude, it installs just like it would install on a windows machine. the CPU is just a basic intel i7. It would be a different story if this was one of the newest M1x macs…

if you wanted to run macOS on this then yes, it would definitely be ewaste

XFce makes them snappy like when they where purchased back in the days?

At this point you could have moved them to Mint LMDE, which has GUI tools to to pretty much anything, and it is essentially Debian with Cinnamon and some extra tools built by the Mint team