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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

But you still need ARM specific binaries. If your software doesn’t support your specific flavor of ARM, then you’re out of luck.

(I recently tried to install Zoom on arm64 Debian and it didn’t go so well... Rstudio wasn’t even close to an option)

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I found the same problem when I tried running off Pi OS 64-bit for a day—almost every app that _did_ have a Linux binary available was only able to run under x86_64, not on arm64... More here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...

Zoom, Bluejeans, Dropbox, pretty much all the popular apps I used where I could find a Linux version for my Dell laptop, I couldn't find a way (though got close at least, with Dropbox) to run them on an ARM64 CPU.

Have you tried box86? https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 Let's you run x86 (not x86_64 though) programs on ARM Linux. It does a neat thing where system library calls are converted to ARM system library calls rather than using x86 ones for better performance.

Lots of games work fine with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4aGNqZ724

For Dropbox, you could quite trivially get by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Rclone is what I ended up using and it worked decently well.

Dropbox could run relatively well with qemu user mode.

...and we need new, more hardware for CI/CD that's just dedicated for Apple OSes. Pretty sure we won't be able to use the 5 unused raspberry pi we have.

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