@OneSadCookie@mastodon.gamedev.place having a thunderbolt or usb ethernet adapter to bootstrap will help things. i don't recall having much problem getting Arch, Alpine, or Debian installed on my 2011 Air once the broadcom firmware was installed. the linux broadcom driver did seem to have a bad habit of hard freezing the system though. i had better stability under freebsd (though you'll need to build a custom kernel with the bwn driver and GPL phy implementations enabled) https://duriansoftware.com/joe/freebsd-installation-notes-for-a-2011-macbook-air