Have you looked at this?: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ I used it on my 2015 iMac and it runs the latest OS well.

I’m pretty sure the laptop I installed Debian on has an Nvidia GPU and it was pretty easy to install the drivers, and I’m very much at the tinkering level than an expert.

I’ve tried a few different distros that always seemed to have one issue or another, and they were all based on Debian. So I just tried Debian instead and it’s good, I’m not sure what the other distros are adding.