My organization decided to hold off on purchasing M1 MacBooks for developers until they're better supported by third party software. Too much stuff just crashes or doesn't work well, even with QEMU and Rosetta.
After the November 2020 release of the M1 Macs, Docker and many developer tools were still not available and you would have to wait 6 - 8 months for Docker to be fully supported and out of beta for M1 Macs.
Not quite ideal to wait for your tools to be available on your machine for more months in order to do any work on it.
The smartest thing anyone would have done to save themselves from disappointment and frustration as a developer is by simply using your existing Intel Macs and 'waiting' for the software ecosystem to catch up with the Apple Silicon Macs.
I don't have anything of substance to add but I can definitely echo your experience. I'm still in love with the M1 chips but it is definitely not a seamless transition if you work with Docker a lot. I've had containers behave really strangely and unreproducibly.
ARM 21.10. Greatly improved disk performance. (Not measured, just based on my dev experience with the RoR + MySQL app I am working on.). I did find file sharing via WebDAV and SMB to be lacking so ended up going with sshfs.
Ever since I switched to an M1, I haven't found a way to reliably build and run x86_64 containers on it.
Docker desktop with Qemu is not just painfully slow, it's also very buggy and some containers just can't be built without crashing.
Is there any alternative?