[Joeri]

Apple always drops software support for hardware when they stop providing hardware repairs. They generally consider hardware “vintage” 7 years after its introduction, but sometimes make that longer. They drop support in new macos releases only but they keep shipping updates to the two older releases as well. This means in practice hardware gets about a decade of software support, and the last two years of that without new features. Since the reasons for dropping support usually aren’t hard technical limits the community makes patchers to put new macos releases on older hardware.

To my knowledge Linux has never worked well on intel macs with a T2 chip. Asahi linux is working on bringing good support to m1 macs, so it looks like for good linux support you either need a pre-T2 mac or a post-M1 mac.