Connectivity : It's the last macbook pro to have both a ethernet port and a DVD slot. And you have one of the new thunderbolt ports and a firewire port.
The i5 processor is still good. The only drawback is the screen (and the GPU). But for development it doesn't matter, and for my part, I watch movies on it without any problem. With SSD and RAM you have a computer that is as fast as the latest macbook pro.
It is solid and quite beautiful like all Apple portable computers. The battery is not very powerful (about 5 hours web browsing with chrome), but you can easily get external batteries (like the ThinkPad).
It is easy to install linux on it with the new boot system, though I like macOS because it is still Unix and has a lot of convenient apps and more softwares (and I can still install most of linux apps with macports or compile them myself).