You, sir are asking the right questions. Thank you for this.

Does it still run with a HD? Upgrading to SSD really accelerated mine.

Can‘t run DaVinci resolve as good and a bunch of other reasons. MacOS can be pretty nice.

Definitely not. But still okay for browsing and mail. My main machine is a 27” 5K iMac from 2014 that is running MacOs Sonoma under open core.

I am running Mint on a MacBook Air from 2008

Come on, it is getting better here every day! And up to now this place seems not to be full of shit like reddit was.