ACVM VS sdl12-compat

https://github.com/ubenmackin/ACVM is a good free alternative, arguably better than utm. Parallels is unmatched though

If you want something non-commercial, I've been using ACVM and UTM (UTM exclusively, these days) to run ARM Debian and Ubuntu.

If you absolutely need to boot into Debian, booting on Apple Silicon Macs isn't possible currently, and would be up to the Debian community to eventually support. If you'd be willing to use a VM, I've been using ACVM and UTM since I got my M1 in 2020 to run Ubuntu and Debian for ARM. (There's also Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon which I've personally used for Ubuntu; I can't imagine there's any reason it wouldn't work for Debian for ARM.)

I use (and prefer) ACVM, which is another front end for QEMU which is an open source emulator and virtualization environment that on its own can be a hassle to set up and use (which is why things like ACVM and UTM exist). Try them both and see what you like better. ACVM feels a little faster, for me. UTM is probably likely to be better supported, as we go forward.

You can run other ARM operating systems in virtualization. I've been using ACVM and UTM to run ARM versions of Debian and Ubuntu in QEMU. Running Windows on ARM is still wonky, and largely relies on Microsoft actually providing better support for WOA for virtual machines like Parallels or QEMU. You can't easily boot into Windows or Linux like you could on x86 Macs, but Asahi Linux is working on a version of Linux that will boot on ARM Macs; it's very much in beta. Use at your own risk. (I haven't needed Linux on the bare metal in ages; virtualization works fine for me. YMMV.)

I don't have a Mac Studio yet, but I'd been using ACVM to run ARM builds of Ubuntu and Debian on an M1 MacBook Pro. I've recently switched to UTM, as it seems to be more actively developed.

This is Ubuntu, running in ACVM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-v8CsVLZRJQ

I use Ben Mackin's fork of ACVM over on GitHub, to run ARM versions of Ubuntu.

For Linux on M1, I use ARM Ubuntu in a Qemu VM, which I manage using Ben Mackin's fork of ACVM, available on Github.

Didn't test, but the release notes mention 3D acceleration for Linux is still not available. So, it depends on your definition of 'working'. You might be better of using https://github.com/ubenmackin/ACVM.

It was still 30 FPS at best though, in a game that could run on a potato. My new SDL.dll mystifyingly had no effect. After much research I stumbled upon a project called sdl12-compat which provided an SDL.dll that mapped everything to SDL2.dll, a modern version of the project. I built it and my heart soon sank. I got a glorious 60+ FPS experience for 10 seconds up until I fired a weapon, at which point the game crashed with a segmentation fault. It took me a month or two after that until I stumbled upon an ancient SDL mailing list post by the developer of Cogmind detailing a bug that looked exactly like my crash with a quick hack he found later to solve it. A maintainer of SDL strongly urged him not to use the hack and here we are a decade later with the reason why. I figured out the crash was a bad call to the wrong memory allocator in SDL_FreeWAV (called after, you guessed it, playing a weapon firing sound) and with a hack similar to the game developer’s the game no longer crashed! There was another problem with ear-splitting audio I solved with an SDL2 configuration, but for the most part the secret sauce was all in adapting this existing project to a specific game. The code lives here