It’s works fine with lots of different Linux. There’s another person a week or so ago who asked just this very question. The battery lifetime is directly correlated to how many times it’s been drained and recharged, not age.
If you don’t already have a mac, I’d keep a version of macos on there. It’s useful for running native applications and you can use it to download and create boot media for old versions of the operating system to fix other macs you stumble across.
A very neat thing for multibooting different versions of macos that support the apfs file system is that they can be volumes contained inside an apfs partition. That means that if your new version and old version are each 10gb then your apfs partition only has 20gb used and both the versions will see all the free space and be able to use it.
One thing that macos inarguably does better than linux or windows is color management.
I’m speaking as a 25 year linux user: at least take the chance to learn macos. It’s a useful skill to have and it’s good operating system especially on the target hardware.