I'm still using my MacBook Air M1 with 8gb of Ram as my personal workhorse. It runs docker desktop and VSC better than my T14 whatever windows machine with 32gb ram. But that is windows and it has a bunch of enterprise stuff running. I assume it would work better with Linux, or even windows without whatever our IT does to control it.
With Nvidia Now I can even play games on it, though I wouldn't recommend it for any serious gamers.
Ha. Same here. My personal MBA M1/8GB just chugs along with whatever I need it to do. I have a T480 32GB linux machine at home that I love, but my M1 just does what I need it to do.
And at the shop we are doing technology refreshes for the whole dev team upgrading them to M4s. I was asked if I wanted to upgrade my M1 Pro to an M4, and I said no. Mainly because I don't want to have to move my tooling over to a new machine, but I am not bottlenecked by anything on my current M1.
Man, it's absolutely trivial to migrate your configurations to a new machine.
I'm using Geforce Now on my M1 Air and it's wonderful. Yeah, i'll play competitive multiplayer on dedicated hardware (primarily Xbox Series X because i refuse to own a Windows machine and i'm too lazy for Linux right now -- also, i'm hoping against hope for a real Steam console), but Geforce Now has been wonderful for other things, survival, crafting, MMO, single player RPGs, Cyberpunk, Battlefield, pretty much anything you can deal with a few milliseconds of input latency. To be honest, what they're doing here is wizardry to my dumb brain. The additional latency, to me, just feels like the amount of latency you will get from a controller on an Xbox. However, if you play something that requires very quick input (competitive FPS, for example) AND you're connected to servers through the game with anywhere from 5ms to 100ms+ latency (playing on EU servers, for example), that added latency just becomes too much. I'll say this though: I've played Warzone solo on Geforce Now, connected to a local server with no more than 5ms latency via that connection, and it felt pretty decent. Definitely playable, and i think i got 2nd or 1st in a few of those games, but as soon as it gets over like 15-20ms, you're cooked.