I would use something Fedora-based. It’s just a personal choice from myself, since it’s reliable and very up to date. By using a modern distro, you increase the chance your hardware will perform better.
Workstation: uses Gnome, which can utilize the great trackpad
KDE spin: as you wanted KDE
Atomic (preferably uBlue, but Silverblue or Kionite would be great too): my favourite, maybe you could test too. You can install the KDE version first, and if you dislike it, you can rebase easily to the Gnome or whatever version without reinstalling
What maybe won’t work is the WiFi and some keyboard things from what I’ve heart, but you can test it for yourself
~~I have a 2013 MacBook running Ubuntu. I would recommend Kubuntu because idk which wifi chip your MacBook has but it probably won’t play nice with Linux (which is apple drivers fault). And there is a great guide on how to fix it for Ubuntu
True, it’s Broadcom’s fault. From which ISO? I only have one Mac so I’ve only been able to install there. It worked out of the box but it always randomly froze after two hours of use until I found it was the Broadcom Wifi
I’ve run both Opensuse Leap and Nixos with good luck. As someone else mentioned, it really just boils down to the wifi adapter being shit… But that aside, everyrhing else seemed to work well for me with leap and nix.
Nvidia breaks on me at least twice a year using Tumbleweed. But… That’s my own fault, as I just update almost daily… And too many times I’ve done an update that breaks nvidia. I can’t speak to this issue with leap, as I’ve not run Leap on my machine with an nvidia card.
I think Pop OS might work on that model, and if it does, I would highly recommend it, as the DE is very similar to macOS. If I recall correctly, that distro also has multitouch trackpad functions that behave similar to those on the MacBook.
If you want to install linux because it doesn't support the newest mac os version i would recommend opencore patcher. I use it on my 2013 Macbook pro and it works perfectly fine on ventura(mac os 13) and should work fine on mac os 14
whatever distro you choose, disable the nvidia graphics first. you’ll lose the display out but you’ll gain a cooler laptop with better autonomy. integrated graphics is more than enough to drive Plasma.
Basically anything should work, I had one for a while running Arch + KDE. Wifi doesn’t work out of the box (thanks Broadcom), but once you install the right driver it’s perfectly fine.
That works to get it going, but it’s flaky. The older Broadcom chips need either the old reverse-engineered driver, or the old closed source driver Broadcom released.
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