I loaded up Manjaro ARM on a Crucial NVMe, attached using a UASP-capable USB3 case. I used Sway and the new, FOSS GPU drivers, and enabled hardware acceleration in chromium and vscode.
To my surprise, the browsing experience was absolutely OK, I couldn't notice any lag on most websites, including hw-accelerated YouTube, with the only exception being gitlab.
All other apps (mainly Telegram Desktop, zutty) worked absolutely fine, no difference at all from my daily driver.
Rust compilation also felt normal, it actually felt weird not hearing any fans with 100% CPU usage :)
The only minor disappointment was vscode: for some reason, even when using the same acceleration flags used in chromium, switching files took ~500 ms, which was the main dealbreaker for me (and for some reason the acceleration flags slowed down everything even more, or simply had no effect, quite the opposite of chromium).
I briefly considered learning vim, since it has LSP integration I could keep using all the language servers I used in vscode, but in the end switched back to my laptop after lasting two days (and I probably would've switched back anyway, since I usually work outside with my laptop in spring).