I just got done installing RL 8.5 on a new 2012 mini that I got hold of, a 2.6 GHz i7 model with 16 gigs of memory and 1 TB hard disk. I noticed that Thunderbolt shows up in the Devices under Gnome as shown:
By the way that box runs RL quite quickly. I’m starting to get quite the RL server farm using orphaned Apple hardware.