linux is actually ported to the M1 at this point and you can run it normally (although of course there are likely still some bugs lurking), however the graphics drivers are still a work in progress although coming along very quickly.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/06/asahi_linux_m1_progre...

I'm sure you're right that there are still optimizations to be done, but as you can see from Alyssa's tweet there, it is still a very fast piece of hardware for normal developer usage, as long as you don't fall into one of the scenarios that probably requires further tuning (x86 emulation probably being an obvious one, no idea if they've got Total Store Ordering working in KVM yet but that's obviously a key feature).

mega kudos to the Asahi team, the progress has been really tremendous, it's been just about 6 months since kickoff and they've made progress that some people insisted would take multiple years/was impossible at all.

So, for the most part, the lions’ share of distros still run emulated.

In that case, running “only slightly faster” seems like win.

I’m sure we’ll be fully native, soon enough. We’ve had native ARM Linux for years (Android). Should be fun.