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Comment by Icathian | Hacker News Reader

I used an m1 pro for work for about a month. I wound up returning it and getting issued a Linux laptop instead.

The laptop itself is absolutely amazing. The thousand paper cuts with things not properly supporting m1 was just too much to bear.

I think if the projects you're hoping to work on have first class support for Apple silicon you can't find a better machine for love or money. If they don't, then steer clear.

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If you had one early on consider it again. The first 6 months was abysmal for me, but ever since https://github.com/lima-vm/lima has been locked down I have ways to compile everything and run any container I want. `nerdctl` has taken a tiny bit of effort to learn but it's been well worth it.

When I first got my M1, support was pretty rough. These days it's pretty tough to find something that's broken.

The biggest incompatibility to point out is VMs. UTM exists, but is more limited in its capabilities and isn't as fast as I'd like. I've switched to using docker for everything instead of the standard Vagrant/VirtualBox setup everyone else at my org uses.

> The thousand paper cuts with things not properly supporting m1 was just too much to bear.

This was almost me in Nov 2020 - Firefox barely worked, Docker was a no-go, Homebrew choked on probably 50% of packages - but in 2022 I can't recall the last time I ran into a Apple Silicon-specific issue.

Once the Linux kernel supports M1 you'll just be able to use regular ARM distros on it.

https://asahilinux.org/

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of things did you find did not support the M1 chip?

A variety of things nobody else will care about, but the big one was VM support. I can't do my job without the occasional Linux VM.

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