Mainly Kali for my needs, completely hassle-free on VMware but any ARM version should work.

Want me to try a particular distro as a test?

I dunno if that counts, but I was given a Macbook Air M2 from work that I didn’t need and I’ve been happily running macOs on it for simple daily use.

Whenever the situation requires Linux I fire up one of 3 distros I have as a VM and they work like a charm. I pass-through one of the USB ports to the VM and it’s basically an M1 with Linux at that point in terms of performance (well not really, but it’s very smooth, no complaints).

Might wanna go that route instead, just run macOs natively and your favorite distro as a VM.

One way to do it is for each company to develop their own flavor to ship with their laptop, in much the same way phone manufacturers just modify Android and ship it.

As an example, check out System76 and their laptops featuring their Pop!_OS distro, which is very user friendly and stable in my experience.