Apple MacBook aluminum

We have a 2008 Macbook (aluminum body, I forget if it's a pro), which my wife passed along to my three-year-old son. He is not the gentlest with it, and it's still running strong. We have a 2013 Macbook pro that's been nothing but flaky. Living far from any Apple store, it's a pain to deal with. We fully expect the 2008 to outlast the 2013. Apple hardware is great when it works; it just feels like a crapshoot whether you get a good model or not. My 2013 T430s is still going strong, and I expect to use it another 3 years. I'll upgrade to a larger SSD and more RAM at some point, but I love the hardware. I take care of it well, and it's holding up as expected.

Aluminum MacBook (Late 2008). Got it on Dec 2008 and it's still working today. Six years old going on seven. I upgraded its RAM to 8GB (the maximum it can take) and installed an SSD. Still runs relatively well. Although, I did have a few problems with it. Hinge cracked (fixed by warranty), optical drive broke (replaced with an HDD cage), got a bloated battery (bought a new one), charger wire got frayed so it stopped charging (bought a new one). I took really good care of it too. Never dropped it, never spilled anything on it. So those were unfortunate disappointments. But all in all I'm happy with the build quality.

Very true, the overly slim form factor has limited them I remember when I bought my first alu-Macbook in 2009 and I could remove the battery and add additional memory by just flicking a latch

I bought an aluminum one in January 2009 if my memory serves me right. It was a nice machine, wasn't it first aluminum MacBook? I don't think it was the Pro version (if it even existed). I certainly didn't have money to buy anything but the cheapest model.

I can at least confirm that Ubuntu 22.10's out-of-the-box touchpad support is PERFECT on a 2008 Macbook Aluminum (Core 2 Duo / 8GB RAM / SSD). Exactly as you'd expect with macOS. I was actually astounded at how better this model worked with Ubuntu compared to El Capitan (last official supported version) or even Catalina (the last unsupported version I tried with dosdude1's patches, as I didn't know about OCLP at the time - perhaps OCLP didn't even exist when Catalina was out). Granted it's an older model (compared to yours) and the Linux kernel probably already has support for its touchpad generation baked in, but I'm sure it won't be hard to load an extra driver (e.g. Synaptics?) or tweak some config file to get it to work like on macOS. I had a similar issue with T440 & X240 Thinkpads and the touchpad performance improved dramatically by installing the Synaptics driver from Ubuntu repos (on Ubuntu 20.04 at the time). Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.