I think the flaw in Linus’ argument is that this happened in the 90s-2010s for x86. A foundational time, especially for his worldview, but I don’t know that the pattern repeats (some of his viewpoint is colored by his time at Transmeta).

The development world today looks very different. Back then, language support for other architectures was more bespoke and CPU vendors had to add support for their chips. Today, there are plenty of very rich, platform-agnostic (both CPU and OS) libraries. Additionally, mobile development has sufficiently matured ARM development that I don’t think that argument holds. If it did, then developers wouldn’t be able to develop on their x86 MacBooks and deploy to their mobile Apple devices (yes it’s ARM now but it hasn’t been for the majority). I think the plain x86-box -> server story is pretty solid for but the cloud has changed that. Everyone is now starting out in the cloud with CPU-agnostic languages where switching architectures usually is as simple as changing 1 line in a config. In some cases it matters but the vast majority of SW dev shops don’t feel this like you used to in the 90s and 00s. Plus M1s now provide developers with local ARM development.

Linus's reasoning is sound, but the issue is that ARM development platforms are becoming a thing and to be honest I see x86 as being in the early stages of a death spiral and so does Intel the way they're focusing on the fabrication side of their business.

If anything programmers are adopting ARM based computers faster than the rest of the market. As pretty much every developer tool gets ported for Apple silicon every company is going to shrug and go "May as well release an ARM Windows/ARM Linux build as well".

We've been migrating our production to Graviton2 (now Graviton3). Our developers run x86 Macs. Everything runs on the JVM, Python, Node, Go, so nobody feels like there's a difference. The ARM transition has been transparent for us.

Linus' reasoning makes sense, but the real world disagrees with him (at least in our case).

Linus's argument is that devs will use the same processors in production that they develop on. But everyone already has to develop for ARM because mobile runs ARM. And now the M1 Macs do too (and these AWS servers). So if you're forced to use ARM because of mobile and now there are good options for desktop and servers to use ARM as well, I don't see why people wouldn't switch to them. Basically Linus's own logic seems to contradict his claim.

That is, as far as the reasoning applies, why I consider the M1 Macs so pivotal. The MB Pro already was a very popular machine for developers. Now it not only got much faster and better, it also offers access to great ARM development machines. Be it for the largest market, smartphones, or for the cloud solutions based on ARM machines as the Graviton.

1. Fewer and fewer people run their stack on the laptop. There is tooling today to run even unit tests remotely pretty painlessly like bazel (and the like) and docker

2. With languages like java, go, python, node it doesn’t even matter

3. Devs are migrating to arm en masse (M1s)

Unlikely for now. The ball has just started rolling with the M1.