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Lessons learned from moving to linux-arm64

I recently moved to a Macbook M1 as my daily driver (running Linux on top). It came to my surprise how well everything worked it was.

Virtualization

There are currently three options for how to run a Linux VM on top of macOS on the M1. Parallels, VMWare Fusion and UTM. I used all of them in the past, they all work fine. UTM is based on qemu and has generally more sharp edges.

Linux Setup

I selected Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 LTS. An ISO for the arm version is available out of the box. Installation was super easy and painless. i3wm, neovim and zsh were installable through the ubuntu repositories. Alacritty (my terminal emulator of choice) was installable through cargo.

Developer Tools

Setting up developer tools started to get tricky. Azure CLI on arm is only available through pip (pip install azure-cli), IntelliJ is not yet officially supported (but works fine), and my favorite file comparison tool “beyond compare” does not (yet) provide an arm64 version. Other tools I use like VSCode, Terraform, k9s, docker, and kubectl were no problem to install.

Conclusion

Using an arm64 based Linux environment as a daily driver is a viable option. Thanks to the popularity of AWS Graviton and Raspberry Pi 4, most applications and tools already provide support for ARM64.