So you own a perfect mastering device at home, now you get the ultrathin laptop to wander about. One isn’t so portable, and the other may not be able to hardware-encode AV1 files. It only matters if it can play them decently.
Also, the M chips are good, but not that good. My M2 pro is about like a 12th gen i7, not like thrice quicker in any everyday way.
Ultra-specific: soundtracks for theatre plays. I’m happy with the available vst’s, but I am not a musician, I don’t play instruments - I record people or I rip stuff & work from there. That said it means multi-band comps, tube-like preamps, parametric eqs, de-essers, echo/delays etc… It’s OK really.
Maybe all this is a bit like photoshop vs gimp: I mostly only ever used Ardour since forever and I cannot compare / suffer / get my workflow irremediably blocked because it doesn’t work for me like I expect it to.
Ardour is really a powerhouse now, and with the Pipewire audio stack, switching inputs or monitoring in every which way is just a breeze.
There’s tons of Linux musicians advice out there, including on, ahem, reddit. Yeah I know.
Now that we have Steam on Asahi my macos partition gonna get shrinked to minimal functional lol.