[arnd]

It was apparently built for a very specific use case (doing CI for some application) so I guess it has to be ARM Linux. You can run Linux in a VM guest on Mac mini, but some limitations remain:

- The project was obviously started before the Mac mini was available

- Linux guests are still rather experimental and might not behave the same way as a real machine.

- 32-bit Arm applications do not run on the M1, it is a 64-bit-only CPU

- Nested virtualization is said to not work yet under MacOS, so you cannot run KVM guests inside of the Linux guest

- If you need to spin up lots OS instances simultaneously to test various setups and each of them need 8GB, you can have at most 2 instances on a Mac.

For most use cases, none of those apply, so you would be better off with a Mac, a Graviton instance or an off-the-shelf PC.