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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

The UTM experience (https://mac.getutm.app/) has been stellar for me. Knowing that others have commented on this being a rough initial release, I really have no reason to try it out.

And while UTM was relatively unknown a year ago, it's become quite popular in my circle of Apple Silicon users, so I imagine VMWare's reception on Apple Silicon is going to be lukewarm at best.

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UTM's lack of any accelerated graphics makes a non-starter for most desktop applications these days. It's fine as a frontend to QEMU, but that's all it is. Fusion and Parallels will continue to dominate this space on MacOS.

They do but it's experimental and only for Linux guests: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/releases/tag/v2.2.4

Unironically the best experience for Linux in my case is no graphics adapter but instead a serial console. You can copy and paste text from the vm console window without any additions!

Fingers crossed that it eventually works but for me it invariably results in a crash or graphical corruption making my VM unusable regardless of the distro (have tried Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc)

With Fusion 13, I see no way of creating a macOS guest VM. It isn't in the VM options list. UTM will automagically connect to Apple's servers and download the latest version.

Problem with UTM is there is no copy/paste or file transfer between a macOS host and guest which is a huge barrier. I'm spoiled by Hyper-V enhanced sessions, I suppose.

> Problem with UTM is there is no copy/paste or file transfer between a macOS host and guest which is a huge barrier.

What if you connect to the UTM guest via RDP or or Apple Remote Desktop if it’s a Windows/macOS guest, respectively?

ARD works great via Safari (vnc://machine-name.tld). Thank you!

I can't believe Apple charges $80 for the ARD client in the App Store...

It lets you do things like run a zsh command over 300 mac machines at once, it's not just a simple VNC client.

Fusion only supports MacOS VMs on Intel, are you on Apple Silicon?

Yes, an M2.

Accelerated graphics was painful when doing macOS on macOS until macOS 13. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets added now in the future with virutalization.framework if they haven't done so already.

Why is accelerated graphics mandatory? I'd think most non-gaming, non-graphics-heavy apps would do fine with the CPU.

Electron apps (and other apps that uses Chromium Embedded Framework) are commonplace these days and they requires GPU acceleration. They'll crash if launched on system without gpu acceleration. Sure you can pass a command line argument to disable gpu acceleration to those apps (e.g. `--disable-gpu` on most electron apps and `--no-zygote` on apps that use chrome embedded framework like spotify), but you can't expect average users to know how to do that.

Most desktop nowadays have a compositor that rely on the gpu to render nice effects like blur, transparency, animations (including keeping the content of the window while dragging).

I just got Windows 7 running on an M1 Macbook Pro with UTM today actually. It took a bit of configuring but I am getting pretty amazing performance considering it's having to do a full ISA emulation (not using Rosetta.. QEMU can use Rosetta to translate for Linux ELF's in Linux VM's but it doesn't seem like it can do so under an x86 Windows VM). I have one legacy Windows application that I need sometimes randomly when traveling and this is amazing that it runs as well as it does- it is a program using OpenGL and the performance is useable for basic tasks and I am just using a the default VGA card emulation, I haven't even setup any advanced GPU card emulation yet. I'm blown away.

If you Crossover works for your app you can pipe x86 32 but apps through Rosetta 2 and Crossover will bridge the GPU stuff to an actual GPU. This is a lifesaver for me on 1 ancient app I have to use for work.

Can it be used with docker for Mac, or some competitor?

You probably would prefer colima to get an easy VM for docker/kubernetes using qemu in the background.

Nice, thank you! This does look promising.

https://www.arthurkoziel.com/replacing-docker-desktop-for-ma...

According to this article, file sharing between the container and the host is about 80% faster in Colima than Docker Desktop for Mac, but still much slower than native:

    # Docker Desktop for Mac
    IOPS: 1545
    Bandwidth: 6.3MB/s

    # Colima
    IOPS: 2786
    Bandwidth: 11.4MB/s

    # Native
    IOPS: 28.6k
    Bandwidth: 117MB/s

Colima doesn't have all the annoying popups, telemetry, and other commercial aspects that turn off many developers from Docker Desktop for Mac. It sounds like a drop-in replacement otherwise. Terrific!

I'll still try to keep as much development native as possible for now, but if it ever gets to be a real pain I'll give Colima a try before mixing docker entirely.

never managed to run win11 so I gave up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9opNMFY497o

Windows 11 runs beautifully on UTM.

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