I’ve been in the Raspberry Pi world for awhile and had a taste of both the more limited selection of ARM based binaries, but also exposed to a bit of cross compiling. I’m sure I’ll run into things that are x86 specific, but that will also give me a chance to be exposed to the benefits and limits of x86 emulation on Apple Silicon.

This brings me to cloud compute. For x86 binaries with no chance of substitution/cross compiling, I am planning on spinning up an x86 cloud instance that will likely accommodate a few more of my needs. I’m fully aware that there will be some applications that will simply have no accommodation, mitigation, or substitution on ARM and I’ll have to “go without”. I do have x86 a Linux desktop in regular use.

Lastly, I also take advantage of ARM based cloud compute, as it is SUBSTANTIALLY cheaper than x86 cloud compute. Having a native workstation architecture matching the cloud compute architecture, I think, can possibly make live easier instead of harder.

Worst comes to worst, I can press an old x86 laptop back into service running Linux.