HACKER Q&A
📣 alexanderbergi

Early M1 adopters in Cybersec, how has it been? is it mature enough?


I landed a cybersec job and I'm allowed to choose a laptop. I would love to know what your experiences have been like so far.

  👤 runjake Accepted Answer ✓
It's freaking awesome. Silent and fast. But if you're doing cybersec, you're probably going to want an x64-based machine, for maximum compatibility with software and virtual machines.

There is virtualization software for the M1 and it works well, but it does not virtualize or emulate x86/x64 images, where things are the most available and stable.

Eg. there is Kali Linux for ARM, but its not as mature or compatible as on x64.

Additionally, several Python libs are still broken on ARM.

👤 sdevonoes
Just be aware that if you rely on booting VMs (e.g., Virtualbox, VMware) you won't be able to do that in M1s.

VMware is working on it, but it's not ready yet. Virtualbox will not be ported, and Docker is about containers, not VMs.