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Comment by beeman | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Multipass [0] for a while and it works great to quickly spin up an Ubuntu environment on my MacBook. It supports cloud config in case you want a custom instance.

It seems to be limited to running Ubuntu instances only (at least, I haven't figured out how to run other Linux instances) but if you want a quick clean Ubuntu VM I would recommend it.

0: https://multipass.run/

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Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

This looks quite interesting! Much more elaborate in options I guess. Though the limitation to Ubuntu is something they should look into expanding. Does it also allow me to persist state?

> Does it also allow me to persist state? You mean snapshots like a real vm? No, and thats why I don't use it.

Edit already, since I was wrong

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/multipass-snapshot-command/39...

I second this recommendation. Multipass is a convenient cross-platform way to run Ubuntu VMs.

Would love if Multipass could extend to other UNIX flavors as well.

On Linux you can specify any cloud-init qcow2 image with file:// or http(s):// and it works beautifully

$ brew install multipass

Leeloo Dallas Multipass

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