> As a development machine it will be all but useless as you find things that won't compile or work correctly on the new CPU arch.
I mean, I suppose it depends on what sort of development you're doing, but in 2020 most libraries do work on ARM. There'll no doubt be a painful period (as there was with the death of PPC), but it shouldn't be that dramatic.
Still, wouldn't you want to test it on the same architecture? It's fine if you just compile on a server but then you can as well have a cheap client with only a web interface.
Mobile developers have done this for years; I don't really see how testing it on your local machine can really tell you much other than "it compiles and seems to run" if you're actually going to run it on completely different hardware.
I mean, I suppose it depends on what sort of development you're doing, but in 2020 most libraries do work on ARM. There'll no doubt be a painful period (as there was with the death of PPC), but it shouldn't be that dramatic.