SAWS VS virtual-environments

I'd recommend giving https://github.com/donnemartin/saws a shot.

This action runs using Node 16. If you are using self-hosted GitHub Actions runners, you must use runner version 2.285.0 or newer.

This is the OS and version used for the virtual environment in which run our tests. I recommend always using a specific version, such as the latest stable version, rather than latest, which is risky because you may then suddenly start to see test failures caused by a version update that has nothing to do with your tests. See virtual-enviroments for the latest stable version.

This, I setup Azure DevOps pipeline that clones this: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments Runs it in Linux servers, copies VHD into Storage Account, creates an image from it and makes it new image for Azure Scale Set. Runs every Monday Morning on timer.

I'm in a similar boat - love the performance/battery of my M1 MacBook Air, but the ecosystem is just too messy at the moment for me. I have a few tools I need to use that haven't yet been making official Apple Silicon releases due to GitHub actions not supporting Apple Silicon fully yet. The workaround involves maintaining two versions of homebrew, one for ARM and one for x86-64, and then being super careful to make sure you don't forget if you're working in an environment that's ARM and one that's X86. It's too much of a pain to keep straight for me (I admit it - I lack patience and am forgetful, so this is a bit of a "me" problem versus a tech problem).

My solution was to give up using my M1 mac for development work. It sits on a desk as my email and music machine, and I moved all my dev work to an x86 Linux laptop. I'll probably drift back to my mac if the tools I need start to properly support Apple Silicon without hacky workarounds, but until GitHub actions supports it and people start doing official releases through that mechanism, I'm kinda stuck.

It is interesting how much impact GitHub has had by not having Apple Silicon support. Just look at the ticket for this issue to see the surprisingly long list of projects that are affected. (See: https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2187)

https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues you can always request additional software to added to GitHub's machines, costs nothing to ask.

I'm not disputing your claim that it could be true as I say, it makes sense, there is even some evidence they are getting ready for feature parity as I said in my comment with the hosted agent builds but I am arguing the point with my "what aboutism" as it isn't clear.

Also Ubuntu 22.04 is not currently available on Github so I can't use CI for now - https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/5428

As for M1 support, I’m still waiting for GitHub to add M1-based GitHub Actions runners (issue).

GitHub provides hosted runners which can run your workflow in different virtual environments. The "ubuntu-latest" environment already contains a recent version of Node.js which is ideal for testing JavaScript applications.

As mentioned in this GitHub issue, the issue seems to affect only windows-2022 image. You can use the following script to install .NETFramework 4.6.1 to the agent.