Any progress on this? Would be happy to hear that. (Macbook Pro 2018)
Please see -
and also this -
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=APFS-Development-For-Linux
It is highly unlikely that MATE devs would be working on something like this. I would suggest posting your question elsewhere.
Good luck cheech790.
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Thank you very much, let's hope the open-source read-only get's developed soon. BTW, I've seen the mentioned "closed-source" apfs driver on github, it's now also open source. Maybe it helps since this seems to go completely unnoticed so far. https://github.com/Paragon-Software-Group/paragon_apfs_sdk_ce
So, just to be sure, on the current state I can only hope to maybe read APFS on macOS, but can't install it on the internal SSD, right?
Got no idea. "Hope" is the operative term here.
Edit: See this about support for T2 chip -
And also this for a possible work around -
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I had a Macbook Pro when I was at my last job. I think it was a Late 2017 model. I was doing some experimenting and installed Ubuntu MATE to an external drive.
While I needed to compile drivers to make the keyboard/trackpad work, it could see the SSD (NVMe). I used Startup Security Utility to relax the security settings via Apple's Recovery (Command+R) first.
I would suggest testing a live USB on the hardware (using the latest kernel possible - like 19.04 or daily images).
A resource like would be useful - this one documents the 2016-2017 models:
Somebody (very recently it seems) have put together patches to install a custom Linux kernel compatible with the 2018 Macbook Pro - but this one is for Arch: 
Regarding being able to read APFS partitions, my understanding is that there is an experimental open source FUSE driver that can be compiled from source:
FUSE is already installed and used in Ubuntu. For example, FUSE is used when mounting NTFS partitions.
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The big difference here is I think the T2 chip, which makes it (I think) uncomparable with 2016 & 2017 Macs. Anyways, this was actually more good information than I could hope for and I would even have the chance to do it via Arch-Linux, unfortunately I'm not a Linux native and I'm glad to be able to run and use meanwhile every Debian based version and I need my mac for work, so, as soon as there's a kernel for any Debian distribution I'll jump on it. 
I tried btw the install on external hardware, especially Ubuntu Mate 18 final (should I better choose 19?) and I wasn't able to do it since the installation is crashed every time at some point, I don't really know what the issue was.