I think you can get very far with ArcGIS Online. There are things you can only do in ArcGIS Pro, but basically everything shown in the article (and a lot more) can be done in the browser. And you get a great set of apps (including Field Maps and QuickCapture) for field editing/data capture.

In my personal experience with using ArcGIS, I have only needed Pro in two situations. The first is when I'm trying to georeference a raster (I just bought one from SkyFi). The second is when I've bought a tutorial book that is based around ArcGIS Pro (e.g. Modern Policing Using ArcGIS Pro).

If you want to learn ArcGIS and not rely on Pro, you can visit the learn site and filter to just ArcGIS Online: https://learn.arcgis.com/en/gallery/#?p=agol

I won't say more, but I have personally been impressed by the rate of improvement in feature capability in ArcGIS Online. I am not aware of any plans to move Pro to macOS, I feel your pain there.

ArcGIS online is absolutely not an alternative to ArcGIS Pro. Not even close. Nobody spending more than a small amount of time using GIS beyond being an end user is going to find online a worthy replacement for Pro. It's a publishing platform with a few analytical tools that each cost credits to run, not a spatial sciences package. Online is good for data capture and integration, but not for someone who wants to perform regular or more complex analytics.

There are currently no plans to rewrite ArcgGIS pro for M1 mac hardware according to ESRI. The move to Pro should have made it much easier to do, but its still a huge task.

The ESRI community have recently had a lot of success with M1/2 hardware, Parallels 17+, Windows 11 arm, and ArcGIS Pro. Just note that you won't be making 3d videos with it comfortably. Everything else seems to be working very well.

I feel like Online can do just about nothing with rasters or raster analysis, and that is fully half of GIS.

What is the justification for paywalling a very basic, old GIS function like Raster Georeferencing into an expensive "Pro" category?

ArcGIS Pro is just the name for the current iteration of a desktop suite (after ArcMap). ArcGIS Online lacks many of the „classic“ GIS features, especially raster features.

I think it’s just that the web map viewer is a new product and that feature hasn’t been implemented yet (but I’m not on that team and don’t know their roadmap). And it’s not really a paywall thing since the personal use license gets you both online and desktop apps including Pro.

I installed ArcGIS "home edition" in Windows 10 for Arm on an M1 via Parallels and it performs rather well. QGis has never really been my thing, I guess I learned Arc (3.2) at too young an age and this old dog wont (no time) learn new tricks.

Good question! Also why isn't there a Linux version? Maybe there is some collusion somewhere between two of the major monopolies in desktop computing?

Their server offering includes Linux.

Their desktop version doesn't. Their target audience is large to very large enterprise. Their customer base is overwhelmingly windows based. They know this, so they've shrunk their dev costs to account for it.