Yeah, same. I don't get the point of buying an expensive and benchmark crushing piece of ARM hardware for some development work if it has the utility of a $200 Chromebook where you have to SSH into powerful X86 machines to actually achieve your development goal.
The biggest performance eye opener for me was when I opened outlook.office.com. On M1 its almost instantaneous where on my old mac (maxed MBP 2015 & Mojave OS) or Ubuntu Desktop machine (32GB RAM & i7 6700) it took 10 seconds or more (all done on the same network).
I noticed I fell out of the "flow" a lot less on M1, because actions that took a few seconds on other machines are now instantaneous.
Regarding the Intellij Idea and Docker, my old 16GB MBP 2015 Mojave was struggling hard and getting very hot with 100K LoC project. I would definitely use the Gateway on old machine aswell.
To be fair, both your 2015 MBP and 2015 6th gen Intel desktop are pretty outdated compared to your M1 Macbook, so of course they're slow in comparison, what else did you expect?
For a more apples to apples comparison, Intel 12th gen and AMD Ryzen 6000 series would also give you a lightning fast experience comparable to your M1, especially since modern systems come with faster memory and faster storage than your 2015 machines, contributing to the perception of speed.
Yes, hard to believe but that was seven years ago. In the old days it would have been like comparing a 286 to a 486. Intel has certainly plateaud since then but Apple's ARM kept some of that momentum.
One thing I'll throw out there is that I've recently been running IntelliJ using jdk 17 with ZGC as the garbage collector, and it seems snappier. (You can use the 17.0 runtime that jetbrains releases on github, this page has more related info https://mustafaakin.dev/posts/2021-12-08-running-intellij-id... )
We might have different definitions of "just fine".
On my M1 Max MBP Jetbrains Rider stars in under two seconds. Loading the quite large project takes another two.
On my previous laptop, an i7 MBP, it took in the order of minutes to get Rider to the point where I could actually start writing code with codecompletion. It sounded like a jet taking off while Rider blasted all cores at max to enable the smart completions.
The M1 Max isn't even slightly warm in the same case. Haven't found out a single spot where it would've even slightly stuttered.
Parallels works fine, VMWare Fusion provides a tech preview for M1 - I’m running Debian arm64 VMs this way. Both (AFAIK) don’t support x86 guests and don plan to (virtualization vs emulation). So you’d have the same issues as with as with Docker.
There seems to be a work around with qemu and UTM but I cannot speak to its performance or how viable this solution is.