Just FYI, asklemmy is intended for interesting and open-ended subjects of discussion, not for single-answer support problems like this, so I won’t be surprised if this thread is deleted.
That said, I feel your machine should be compatible with opencore. Its running Yosemite 10.10 which meets the minimum.
When checking your model make sure you are looking in the right place - press cmd+space, type “system information” and go there. Should be an entry like “MacBookPro[number],[number]” - not the model number, but the device identifier.
I personally have an older Macbook pro which is running Linux, so that’s also a decent option if you want to do it. Pop!_OS is a very mac-like distro that supports pretty much all mac hardware out of the box.