I finally had a bit of time to give @elementary a shot.
TL;DR, looks great, works on my MacBook with Wifi, kind of, would need some more time from my side. (1/5)
The setup was partially super easy, disk encryption set up from the beginning, looks beautiful but had some quirks. It got stuck during the language selection, had to reboot a few times to finally get passed that one. Then created the user, confirmed and instantly was facing a „your account is locked“ screen. Had to reboot again. (2/5)
After the login it showed me that it found a new driver for the MacBook wifi card, I really loved this. Because every distri has it‘s issue and I have to manually research it. Think only Pop_OS! Got it right the first time, but broke it again after an update.
However, the driver could not be installed. Lucky me it shows error details and it turned out a simple apt update was missing. (3/5)
Installed the wifi driver and updates, everything was looking great until I tried to connect to the wifi. I didn’t have time to investigate further, my mission for my old laptop is to have something reliable that just works. So I will continue to hop through distributions in my search. (4/5)
The first experience with Elementary was pretty good and if wifi would have worked I would have continued. I will definitely come back at some point with a fresh mind and look into it with more patience. I really really liked the look. (5/5)