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Comment by suck-my-spez | Hacker News Reader

Are people actually using UTM to do local development?

Im genuinely curious because I casually looked into it so that i could work on some hobby stuff over lunch on my work machine.

However I just assumed the performance wouldn't be too great.

Would love to hear how people are setup…

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When I had a Macbook from work, I set up an Arch Linux VM using their basic VM image [1], and followed these steps (it may differ, since is quite old): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enF3zbyiNZA

Then, I removed the graphical settings, as I was aiming to use SSH instead of emulated TTY that comes ON by default with UTM (at that time).

Finally, I set up some basic scripting to turn the machine on and SSH into it as soon as sshd.service was available, which I don't have now, but the script finished with this:

(fish shell)

    while not ssh -p 2222 arch@localhost; sleep 2; end;

Later it evolved in something like this:

    virsh start arch-linux_testing && virsh qemu-monitor-command --hmp arch-linux_testing 'hostfwd_add ::2222-:22' && while not ssh -p 2222 arch@localhost; sleep 2; end;

I also removed some unnecessary services for local development:

    arch@archlinux ~> sudo systemctl mask systemd-time-wait-sync.service 
    arch@archlinux ~> sudo systemctl disable systemd-time-wait-sync.service

And done, performance was really good and I could develop on seamlessly.

[1]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-boxes/-/packages...

It works incredibly well with Linux VMs, my daily driver. I plug in a USB keyboard, external monitor and Can't Believe It's Not Linux. Only occasionally when I need to use the laptop screen/keyboard does macOS bother me and remind of it real self.

There's around 10-15% performance penalty for VMs (assuming you use arm64 guests), but the whole system is just so much faster and well built than anything Intel-based to day, that it more than compensates.

For Windows, it's lacking accelerated video drivers, but VMWare Fusion is an ok free alternative - I can totally play AAA games from last decade. Enjoy it until broadcom kills it.

With remote development (vscode and remote extension in jetbrains with ssh to VM) performance is good with headless VM in UTM. Although it always (?) uses performance cores on Apple Silicon Macs, so battery drain is a problem

I started using UTM last week on my Macbook just to try out NixOS + sway and see if I could make environment that I liked using (inspired by the hype around Omarchy).

Pretty soon I liked using the environment so much that I got my work running on it. And when I change the environment, I can sync it to my other machine.

Though NixOS is particularly magical as a dev environment since you have a record of everything you've done. Every time I mess with postgres hb_conf or nginx or pcap or on my local machine, I think "welp, I'll never remember that I did that".

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