Save money, run Asahi Linux.
Buy Android phone.
If you still have pain, look at the Microsoft Surface Laptop (or Surface Pro) with Microsoft’s SQ processor. They’re good products with Qualcomm arm chips.
Discussion
Asahi would make sense, really… even better yet, NixOS can use all of its awesomeness and add more on top of it.
Thing is, running Linux on Apple Silicon is still considered alpha to this day. There is no way I will go back to the drivers hell I went through when I was a student. That was fun back then, but I didn’t have dad duties at the time.
Looks like Microsoft SQ might be the best alternative so far…
Wondering if it runs linux…
Check these guys out
May consider next year or when they remove "your mileage may vary" in their documentation