Windows 11 on ARM has been supercharged in 2024 with the arrival of Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus and X Elite series of chips. Where Windows on a Snapdragon-powered laptop was once OK at best, the new generation made it a truly viable alternative to buying something powered by Intel or AMD.
But what about for tasks such as software development? How is Windows on ARM faring in that regard? Who better to talk about the experience than an actual developer. Michael Niehaus has detailed on his blog his use of Windows 11 on ARM over the course of a year for such work.
The caveat, though, is that this isn't talking about a native experience, instead virtualizing Windows 11 on ARM on macOS. But many probably still have questions over whether it's up to the task, or about compatibility, and for the most part, it seems positive.
But how well does Windows 11 work on ARM64, especially when developing software that most likely won’t be running on ARM64? Overall, it works really well: Visual Studio running on ARM64 is flawless, .NET is naturally architecture-neutral, and cross-compiling for x64, MacOS, and Linux is easy. Running Windows x64 binaries is easy because the x64 emulation is very good.
Michael Niehaus - Out of Office Hours
In fact, it seems, one of the bigger issues was having to upgrade the virtualization software to allow more RAM use. There are other troubles, too, such as macOS not supporting nested virtualization, so WSL2 can't be used inside the Windows 11 VM.
Otherwise, it seems this particular developer's biggest hurdle was something Microsoft itself needs to fix.
There was one bigger issue though: SQL Server 2022 doesn’t support ARM64. That’s a really weird omission from Microsoft that one of these days they’ll actually fix (I hope). Fortunately, you can use some third-party scripts to install it, working around issues in the SQL Server installer that would otherwise get in the way.
Michael Niehaus - Out of Office Hours
As much as we like Windows 11 on the new generation of Snapdragon laptops, the wider world has requirements that we'd never even touch. It's encouraging to hear from someone who's been in the trenches first hand, though, that using a Windows 11 on ARM machine for this type of intensive work is entirely doable.
On a native machine, too, you would have the ability also to spin up WSL2, which I've found first hand, works flawlessly on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop, so long as you're using a Linux distro with an ARM64 build.
If you're at all interested in this topic, I definitely recommend reading the whole post. Windows might have taken a while to catch up in the ARM space, but the future is definitely here.
