I'm considering upgrading to a new device and have been using Linux on x86 for a while. Some people are recommending that I buy an Apple M5 MacBook Pro instead. With many OCI images built for x86 architecture, I'm curious about how much of a setback emulation might be in practice these days. Given the impressive computing power of the M5 chip, is this emulation a significant issue, or is it barely noticeable?
5 Answers
Honestly, I’ve switched from an Intel Mac to an M2, and I didn’t run into any major issues. The M2 was significantly faster, and I think any emulation impact was just negligible for me.
Most of the Docker images you need are available on ARM64. If you find any that aren't, it’s usually easy to build them from Dockerfiles yourself. I don’t use any x86 images because the alternatives for my setup are all ARM.
Most of the time, all the containers I need have an ARM build. The only exception I've found was for a specific MS SQL Server image, but that worked fine on Docker desktop, even if it didn’t run on Colima for some reason.
If you're looking to use Linux on Apple, there’s really no need for x86_64 emulation. You can run Linux on ARM just fine. Major distributions like Debian and Ubuntu already have ARM64 images available, so you're probably set without worrying about x86 Docker images.
A good tip is to use Orbstack if you want to run your containers smoothly. It works great for managing containers on Apple Silicon!
True! There are about 1 million images for ARM64 listed on Docker Hub compared to over 12 million total. Just make sure to check the trusted content section for the best options.