Hi everyone.
I have a late-2011 Macbook pro I'd like to install Linux on and I'm tryng to figure out which distro might work best with this hardware. I have no particular preference as to DE or aesthetics; I'm looking for a smooth and stable user experience. In particular, I know the trackpad feel is quite tricky under Linux so I was wondering if there's an "ideal" installation.
Any recommendation? Thanks in advance!

Linux Mint could do the trick.

https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1643 - substitute Mint 18.1 (shortly 18.2) for Mint 17.

Pay particular attention, if required, to the comment on that page that starts "Just wanted to report one tip that was a life-saver for me on installing on Macbookpro 8,3 (17", 2011)..."

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Debian wheezy is the more stable there is.

Until May 2018 that is, when it reaches end of LTS. If you're going for Debian, better to go for Jessie. And of course Stretch is out tomorrow.

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Yeah. Officially, Stretch was just released yesterday. But I've been running it for about a week - just had to change jessie in sources.list to stretch and updated packages.

No chance Mi¢ro$oft could implement an update procedure so simple.

Well, it's simple for us. But unfortunately, there are many who would not be able to handle that procedure, especially if they're afraid of the command-line. However, I have found that it's easier to use Gedit than Nano for the editing because you can use the Find feature to highlight the name of the current branch then paste the name of the one you want.
Save and exit.
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
Wait.
Done.

Most folks are afraid of the command-line. I think it's cooler, faster, and more fun than GUIs sometimes are - especially when you have the black background and green text in Terminal. I got that idea from the Homebrew Terminal profile in Mac OS X.

FWIW, I actually run Solaris on my Macs when not running MacOS X.

Update: I've been running Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 for a week or so and I must admit I'm very pleased so far. Of course it needed some fine tuning, but no big deal, pretty much everything worked out of the box.
As for my main concern (trackpad driver), I found a good compromise: mtrack. It doesn't have a lot of configuration options but in my tests it feels significantly more precise and smooth than synaptics or libinput (too bad for the gestures though).
A nice surprise: battery life is impressive for a Linux distro.

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Do you still have MacOS on your MacBook, or is Ubuntu the only operating system on there? Did you install Ubuntu on a partition or did you install Ubuntu on the whole drive?

If you went with the partitioning, how big is your Ubuntu partition, and how are you handling the OS choice at boot? Did you install something like GRUB or rEFIt? Or do you just hold down option and then choose an OS upon boot?

I'm dual booting Ubuntu(350GB) and Mac OS (150GB). Boot is handled by rEFInd. I prefer it over grub; the only drawback is I lost splash screen at the moment.

I'm not sure how you managed to get the MacOS partition down to 150 gigabytes. I'm currently using 390 gigabytes of my 480 gigabyte SSD, and the only operating system on it is MacOS. At one point I was able to get it down to 225 gigabytes or somewhere around there. I currently have 90 gigabytes free. I could free up about 88 gigabytes my moving some files around. So, I could have the inverse of your partitioning scheme - a 320 gigabyte partition for MacOS and a 150 gigabyte partition for Linux (either Ubuntu or Debian).

After 7 years of piling up stuff in my PC, the OS dedicated SSD is now...
yves@debian141:~$ df -h /dev/sda1
Sys. de fichiers Taille Utilisé Dispo Uti% Monté sur
/dev/sda1 55G 35G 18G 67% /
yves@debian141:~$

But when I look at my data dedicated HDD, I get this...
yves@debian141:~$ df -h /dev/sdb1
Sys. de fichiers Taille Utilisé Dispo Uti% Monté sur
/dev/sdb1 906G 341G 519G 40% /home
yves@debian141:~$

Therefore, I conclude that I am using 35 + 341 = 376GB of disk space.
Quite close to what Mr. Macintosh has.
I mostly do programming and development work on this PC, on top of the usual web and email activity.

I believe it is safe to assume Linux, as well as MacOS, is not very hungry when it comes to use disk space. But I do not have a Mac to check this out.

I know that a fresh debian graphical install uses about 1.4GB.

Truth is I performed a factory reset of Mac Os before doing this, so it is mostly empty

Can you please explain why you want a Linux-only Mac? Mac OS X is a fully compliant UNIX distribution, it can do anything Linux can. I just don't understand the logic behind this. If you want to dual-boot Mac and Linux, just to play around with Linux I understand, but even then it's not really necessary. Like I said before the Mac OS can do everything Linux can do and more!

Personally, I run Solaris on an old Mac Pro mainly because I have a history of Solaris administration plus want to run ORACLE, but that is for work experience purposes mainly to keep up-to-date.