I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.
The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.
All of this only applies to Windows 11- if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.
I don’t think your experience is representative of a generic user. This video from Level1Techs paints a completely different picture. Gaming for example, is pretty much out of the picture in the ARM version of Windows.
Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it’s a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That’s not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.
I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.
The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.
All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.
I don’t think your experience is representative of a generic user. This video from Level1Techs paints a completely different picture. Gaming for example, is pretty much out of the picture in the ARM version of Windows.
Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it’s a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That’s not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.
No. You can’t game on it meaning that the games do not even launch.