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Comment by hmokiguess | Hacker News Reader

Chrome OS? No, thank you. I'll stay with macOS and keep hoping for the Asahi Linux dream

If you are on a M1 or M2 chip you can live the dream _now_ already and install Asahi (Asahi Fedora Remix or Asahi Alarm https://asahi-alarm.org/ - which I am a maintainer of). It works really great (daily driving it since 4 years now...) M3 support is coming soon as well...

No way! I'm on M1 Pro, may be making the move finally ... how's the peripheral support these days? I use a Thunderbolt Display with the Studio Display. Any other particular things I should know?

you can run Arch proper in UTM.app on macos...utm is available on the app store or open source, and wraps the apple silicon hypervisor.framework.

it works fantastic magic. i had dual booted Asahi for a year or so, but really for no good reason once i realized UTM existed.

Do you use x64 emulation with UTM? If so, how's the performance?

No. It's all native Arm. In the UTM app, when creating a new VM, there's an option to say it's going to be "Linux" (generically at that point), which exposes a checkbox which allows you to specify use of Apple Silicon hypervisor.framework, and specifically _not_ x86 emulation.

I use hypervisor.framework, never use x86 emulation, and the result is great. Tested with both Fedora for ARM and Arch for ARM (perhaps CachyOS's bundling of Arch works there, but i did it lower level because i'm an old nerd).

This is what I thought, but idk why the literature about this is never clear that it's ARM Linux only.

which literature? (that question posed, i had to sleuth around to disambiguate oft repeated misinformation before figuring this all out)

I don't have it in front of me, have just seen conflicting info on a lot on articles about virtualization on Mac.

Well wait, UTM's official website clearly says it does support x86 if you're ok with the emu performance hit. Is that wrong?

It does support x86 at higher performance costs.

that checkbox i mentioned above lets you choose to use native Apple ARM via the hypervisor.framework, or use Qemu which lets you do the x86 emulation?

I'm aware of it, though I would like to have a native solution with GPU acceleration and all the hardware benefits.

Why?

I try to stay away from Google if I can, I know Apple isn't perfect either but I am more aligned with them despite it.

Apple portable hardware is unparalleled. Linux is what runs the internet.

For now, my old gaming PC runs as a Linux server hosting all my dev services and home lab projects and my MacBook is where I work with them and build apps that consume them.

It would be nice to have the server setup mirrored on a laptop I could take places with me.

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