When the first M1 launched, my Macbook Pro was 7 years old and I was ready for a replacement. Outside of the need to run Brew using Rosetta (see M1 Mac Home Brew), I can't say I noticed anything. I haven't really bothered to try to update anything to M1 native, as it has been plenty performant.
However, now my VM server is 7 years old, and I am replacing it with a Studio. Already, I am feeling issues, even though I haven't gotten the new machine yet.
- Windows 10 is not officially supported, so I had to get a Windows 11 license
- Docker containers may or may not have binary builds in ARM64. I will need to check on a case by case basis. For cases where I have the dockerfile, I should be able to build everything locally if the registry doesn't have it. I hope I always have access to the dockerfile.
- Same goes for Linux VMs, I have a few binaries that run in X86. I may need run these using qemu
- I don't feel like I can do any sort of prep work prior to getting the machine, because anything I do would be x86
Post Setup
- Everything I run in a docker container was fine. I either had a dockerfile to build with, or the few docker images I relied on came in an arm flavor.
- Windows 11 generally seems to just work with downloads and installs, I may still have to try installing fortinet VPN client, and I was sent some links to issues, but I haven't done it yet
- Windows 11 visual studio doesn't have many .NET SDKs available. I have some older projects I will either need to upgrade to 7, or figure out a way to get the arm compiled SDKs, or can I just install the x86 and it will work? I saw somewhere that windows 11 arm features something like rosetta underneath.
- Kubuntu no longer ships an arm build. THe official advice seems to be to install Ubuntu server and then install "kubuntu-desktop". So far it looks like this just works.
- With one caveat - it seems moving some windows causes the ability to click in the window to stop working
Misc
Unfortunately, I chose to use a sandisk extreme for external storage, and I am seeing all kinds of bad press about these failing without warning. I returned it and got a samsung T7 instead.
I specifically will be looking into whether I can make a virtual OS to run older versions of Adobe on M1. This doesn't sound like it is going to work based on the research I have done so far, but here are my notes that I am keeping as I go along:
And one other thing, I have some x86 linux binaries I need to run on arm64, here is my research on that: