Can you elaborate with some examples of workflows that it is incapable of?

So far I’ve not found any limitations or issues using Ubuntu runners on my OSX dev machine. A couple examples from my workflows: - building docker images - provisioning VMs with the Digital Ocean cli / http api - hardening VMs with ansible - creating/managing k3s clusters with k3sup - deploying apps with helm

I like your suggested approach of using tmate to access the worker mid-way through a run. This should make it faster to develop/debug the steps that make up the workflow. Though this doesn’t address the cycle time of push-to-GitHub/queue-workflow/watch-for-result.

I’m actually going to try combining the two techniques - use tmate to develop inside a local act runner.

Workflows that interact with the Github API heavily will fail as they're not available in act e.g. actions like https://github.com/styfle/cancel-workflow-action. Dealing with secrets is also a bit cumbersome. You can throw the following on actions that are not compatible with act in order to skip them:

if: ${{ !env.ACT }}

That said, despite it's limitations, I've been using both act and tmate in combination for a couple of years. Gets the job done.

That’s a great example and suggestion. Thank you!