Ask HN: Best tool for running a Linux desktop VM on a Apple Silicon Mac?
I am a developer and my employer sent me a MacBook Pro with an Apple silicon processor. I love the Apple hardware, but I've never been fond of macOS. My plan is to run my preferred Debian setup in a VM. I will probably run an arm64 variant of Debian. This setup would allow me to fall back to macOS when necessary, and there are some programs I am required to run that do not support linux. At my employer, Macs are the standard issue workstations.
I have done a bit of research on the available tools. The main options that I am aware of are Parallels and VMWare Fusion. I also tested UTM (which is free and open source), but I ran into some bugs that I could not seem to resolve, and I am not willing to spend time fiddling. My employer is willing to cover the cost, so I am planning to use a commercial offering. However, I have not found many opinions on these tools from real people, with experience of real usage. I will be using this every work day, all day.
What do you recommend?
My requirements are as follows:
- Can run a Debian arm64 desktop as a guest.
- No artificial limitations on the resources that I can dedicate to the guest.
- Has a full screen mode and "pointer lock" feature, so that using the linux guest is completely immersive.
- Can run the guest in a windowed mode, for when I need to switch between the guest and the host.
- Supports sharing files, clipboard, devices.
- Works perfectly with suspend/hibernate.