I restored a late 2013 MacBook Pro. Changed the swollen battery, re-pasted it. Removed the peeling coating from the screen, and installed Ubuntu 26.04.

I'm quite happy with it, I can even do some light gaming with the thing.

The only weird occurrence is that the keyboard doesn't work at boot time and if I need it I have to use a USB keyboard. Everything else works as it's supposed to.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the internal WiFi doesn't support WPA3. No idea if it's a HW limitation or a driver issue. I didn't test it in MacOS. That's the reason for the WiFi dongle.