The weird bug when Big Sur updated part of my life is making me think tried and true might be better.

But, most of that stuff I'm finding good workaround for. So, I'll have a second machine for any legacy software I really need to run. My plan is to take my current mac book pro, which is currently barely functional because of a weird bug introduced when Big Sur updated (it won't charge while in use, but the genius bar confirmed it to be a software, not a hardware, problem), wipe it, and reinstall Catalina. I run computationally intensive stuff in matlab, but nothing big enough that I would, for example, be motivated to rewrite it in a faster language. I used to also run some esoteric unix based scientific software that haven't worked well since I updated this matching to Big Sur, but have mostly replaced with cloud-based versions of the same. I use matlab (including running a couple of fortran and python programs), office applications, slack, zotero, inkscape, latex, vnc viewer, and a VPN.

Namely, that applications I want now won't work on it. Their reasoning is similar to this from that big thread.

Inkscape for mac m1