I recently purchased a Mac Mini M1 in order to begin working on The Art of ARM Assembly Language. To preserve desk space, I just connected it (via Ethernet) to my iMac Pro and used Apple’s Remote Desktop application in order to operate the Mini M1 from my iMac Pro desktop (in a window, much like running Microsoft Windows in a Parallels window). While there was a tiny bit of lag (barely noticeable), performance was fine. This surprised me as the (couple of years’ old) reviews of the product suggested the performance was trash. Oh well, Apple’s product description in the app store mentioned that improved performance was one of the latest and greatest features, I chalked up my experience to that.
One area where performance was noticeably lacking was when running Ubuntu Linux under Parallels on the M1 (this was an ARM version of Linux, so the performance drop was not due to emulation). The cursor was very “laggy” when running under Parallels on Remote Desktop. Fortunately, I only use the command-line shell for my work on The Art of ARM Assembly, so this isn’t an issue. For those running Linux GUI apps, this might be an issue.
One “bug” in the set up is that when you instruct Remote desktop to shut down the M1, it properly shuts down the OS but does not always power off the Mac Mini itself. You have to hold the power button in for 10 seconds (or so) to complete the power-down operation. This is probably a bug on the Mac Mini M1 side.
I also had a 2018 Mac Mini laying around (Intel i7, six cores, 32GB RAM) that I’d used on and off (mostly off) as an Apple Server (running Apple’s Server software). I figured I’d run it in a Remote Desktop window as well to get a little more use out of the thing (currently, I have to hook up a monitor and keyboard to it every time I use it, because of the afore mentioned lack of desk space problem). It works fine under Remote Desktop as well.
Note, by the way, that powering down the x86 Mac Mini from Remote Desktop always works fine.