I have an m1 air and I’ve used it for angular and node web dev including docker. Docker support for me was rough back in march, but it is flawless now. There is no difference to using docker on my intel imac and my m1 air. The rest of the ecosytem has also caught up. Nvm and older node versions were a challenge for a while, but now it works well and I can install old intel builds of node without a problem and use nvm to switch to them.

I was worried about software compatibility on m1 and was glad to have my intel imac for those things it couldn’t do, but in practice it now does everything. Some things require a bit of googling, but that’s par for the course for developer tools. And on the upside, the m1 runs rings around the 9600K in my iMac and it does this without a fan.

This is what I'm afraid of, too. Maybe things are working well and seamless, but the last thing I want to do is have to worry about being the first dev on my team using non-X86, and pushing Arm versions of Docker images all over the place or having to modify my Dockerfiles to use Arm versions instead of X86.

One of the reasons Mac was so nice was that everything worked the same locally as it did on Linux prod machines, whereas even today there are subtle bugs with naive Java or Python code that doesn't deal with paths or line endings correctly. On big multi-team projects, there are always some junior devs on Windows that just don't get it right.

This seems like another problem waiting to happen as more devs start using Arm, while the majority of developers and environments still use X86.

I've been using x86_64 docker containers with the QEMU emulation just fine, and most open source available docker containers are ARM compatible these days.

I don't push containers from my laptop to anywhere, instead those are built on CI/CD... and we are building both x86_64 and ARM containers these days as we are launching new workloads on Amazon's Graviton because it is cheaper and more cost effective.

The eco-system is not just x86 anymore.

It isn't too bad in my experience, having been using an m1 Air since release.

For images with an Arm version available, and that's seemingly quite a lot, it mostly just works(TM). No Dockerfile changes needed.

If you have no other options, you can even run x64 stuff with a bit of low impact futzing. Docker Desktop will use QEMU to do this for you, nearly seamlessly. (though rather slowly)

The biggest gripe I have is the local volume perf, which is "tolerable." This is a problem for Intel Macs too, although to a lesser extent.

(edit for typo)

What issues with Docker do you have? I use it every day and have no issues

It’s a vm

It was also a vm on intel. It has always been a vm on any OS that’s not linux.

This is always going to be the case though. Linux is not macOS and there is no way to do containers on macOS like Linux does.

You also wouldn't want native mac containers. The idea is to run everywhere. Bundling linux in is an improvement for portability when the production for these containers will be linux.

The lack of bootcamp imo is a mistake too given the nature of enterprise software. I know people that are beholden to Autodesk software that doesn't even have a mac version and recommends mac users install via bootcamp, which you can't even do anymore despite there being arm builds of windows.

I fully expect Docker M1 support will match Intel shortly after this new macbook starts shipping

why? its the exact same cpu arch they've had since M1 was announced. Things are better but not 100% and there's no reason to assume they will magically get fixed

Docker has worked almost flawlessly for me. I had a single container which did not run properly but I just rebuilt the image on my M1 mac and it worked fine.