I do this with older Kindles that I do not sign into. It works great and inexpensive.

I use Fedora on my T470 with no issues. It might just be Arch. Have you tried other distros? I wish there was a ThinkPad community here.

I also use Fedora on a 2008 Mac Pro with no issues. I'm really surprised how good it is because I've been using Linux since the 90s and never had it just run smoothly on my older hardware.

Another vote for Fedora. I run it on a 2008 Mac Pro daily just fine. Good luck.