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Manjaro runs great on my MBP 2012. Or you can turn your MacBook Air into a "hackintosh" and install the latest macos on it using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. Just be aware that recent version of macos relies heavily on hardware acceleration (video playback, cryptography, etc) and will fallback to CPU on older unsupported hardware, which is slow and deplete your battery fast.

[1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

Linux is your only shot, apple removed support for i386 binaries and opengl, so 99% of games no longer works.

I'm currently running KDE Neon on a MBP 2012, and I've installed linux on a few apple devices from that era. The nvidia drivers can be a struggle, and wifi drivers have to be configured manually.

But the performance is awesome!

Interesting, I still have a 2012 MBP that works great. I mostly use command line software on it, but it works just fine.