Initial M1 support merged into Linux SoC tree

I used Ubuntu on my sole/main machine for a month up until recently: i9 10900K, 32GB, 1TB NVMe SSD, GTX1080, MSI Z-490-A Pro, 3 x screens.

In my day job I'm a .NET developer so I created a Windows 10 VM for VS 2019 and allocated 4 cores and 12GB RAM. I used VMWare Workstation 16. It was smooth as hell.

I developed PHP/Laravel/Wordpress stuff in Linux using PHP Storm and VSCode. Docker on Linux natively is faster than in WSL2 (I know it's to do with accessing the file system but still...).

I learned a whole bunch of commands in this time and learned to live inside the terminal for a chunk of my work. It was fantastic. I loved it.

I also loved being able to configure Ubuntu and make it look like I wanted with new icons and whatnot: I didn't go mental, but it looked cool when I was finished.

All in all, as a dev machine (and browsing 'n' stuff) it worked... quite ok, sort of: it wasn't all plain sailing. Here are the issues I had

1. Realtek 2.5GB nic would not work so I bought a 1G USB nic and it ran fine without all kinds of tweaking (yes, I tried a bunch of stuff I found online but I can't get the realtek nic to work: something to do with the older kernel)

2a. When waking from sleep it sometimes lost network so had to reboot

2b. When waking from sleep AND with NordVPN on in the background it always failed to find a network card... reboot fixed it

3. Printer (HP MFP M477DW) would disappear frequently. Ubuntu would find it again when I asked but it wouldn't print to it. This required wizardry to get it running... more miss than hit so I ended up only using it through the Windows 10 VM

4. It would hang sometimes. Music would still be playing in the background but would become unresponsive. Happened maybe 5 times in a month. Reboot to fix.

5. VMWare workstation wouldn't work properly if I had display scaling turned on inside Ubuntu: it had no idea what resolution to show so I had to turn it off making things smaller than I'd like on the Ubuntu DESKTOP

6. Sound would fail regularly: usually crackled when I opened a web page. So I either close every browser window or stop all sound playing for a minute or so. I use a soundblaster something-or-other card.

7. OnlyOffice would open off-screen every single time. I had to do Alt+Space every time. Works perfectly on Windows 10. I switched to Libreoffice

All in all, it has come a long way since I last used it a few years ago but I NEVER have any of these issues in Windows 10. Ever. And, whether we like it or not, we tend to remember the bad stuff and I can't get away from the fact that W10 is just more stable.... for me, on my hardware, at least.

But I should caveat that by saying that I've disabled literally EVERYTHING in W10 using O&O Shutup, including updates (I've also deleted the Windows Update Medic Service dll so it doesn't turn updates back on). I hate notifications and I want to pick when I run updates myself - given the spotty nature of the updates I usually wait a while, like when I've finished some client work and can afford a bit of downtime if the update fails)

In Linux' defense, VMware workstation 16 running Windows 10 is smoother than a Windows 10 VM on VMware workstation on Windows. No idea why, it just runs smoother. If Linux stability was fixed (waking from sleep especially) I would switch immediately but all the tiny, annoying niggles that I just don't get with W10 are enough to keep me on W10... W10 is a tool and, for me, it's a better one for now.

In any case I guess it'll get fixed eventually.

Or all you do is use the browser.