From the article:

> I work at Red Hat. Mostly on AArch64 support in several projects.

So an ARM developer, working for a major Linux distro vendor and trying to dogfood their work, used the closest thing to an ARM workstation that Linux can run on.

What other alternatives would you suggest? The various Apple Silicon or Snapdragon laptops that have their own well-documented problems running Linux? A smartphone running as a desktop?

There aren't very many ARM-based options that are even feasible for use as a developer desktop, even if the software did work correctly.

Apart from the obvious "well, don't do that then", I'd probably use an ARM-based ODroid for development work, and if I needed more horsepower, the ODroid as a front-end for said thing with more horsepower.

(I actually do development on ODroids, they're quite nice, if underpowered compared to the Intel/AMD equivalents).