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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

Would UTM be an option?

https://mac.getutm.app/

Works great for me, I run an ARM64 Linux VM using the Apple native framework. macOS is configured to get out of the way, I only need Firefox, iterm2, and some custom shortcuts. I code and do pretty much everything on the VM. As a Linux user this has made the work-issued M1 Pro a great laptop, which I wasn't sure about.

I kind of like this option. Running the front end/client natively and the back end/server in a VM works great.

In the future Asahi or a native Ubuntu port might be a good option, but a VM is almost better in some ways since it's portable/migratable, has easy snapshots, has better isolation, etc.

Utm is just qemu, and qemu is actually open source. Utm hides an enormous amount of what they do (just saying not open source again in a different way), and that's definitely not what you want in a base system.

So it would likely be much better to simply install qemu instead.

UTM is open source (Apache2). You can also add any argument supported by the bundled version of QEMU using the GUI.

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/blob/main/LICENSE

UTM uses qemu or Apple's own virtualization framework, which runs macOS.

Does UTM not use Hypervisor.framework through QEMU? QEMU has built-in support for HVF: https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/HVF

There's the Hypervisor framework, which is the low-level framework that replaces the need for a kernel extension for type 2 hypervisors, and then there's the more recent Virtualisation framework which is a more high-level framework for running VMs. QEMU's HVF uses the Hypervisor framework, and UTM also supports running VMs with the Virtualization framework (which is what Vimy and Viable also use). Note that the Virtualization framework also has support on Apple Silicon for running macOS guests as well as Linux guests.

UTM is open source.

Also, running UTM instead of Qemu has some benefits. e.g. bridged networking

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