Show HN: Lume – OS lightweight CLI for MacOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon

The title of this post took me about 3 attempts to parse, because "OS" is more strongly bound to Operating System in this context (but presumably it's supposed to read as Open Source)

congrats on the open sourcing and launching! beyond the desire to run VMs in "1 command", i don't quite get the reasoning behind this project. could you elucidate? like, besides running macOS VMs, how is it different from lima, colima, and friends? the name lume is quite unfortunate.

the hard part about running VMs isn't really how to launch them (well, ahem, i'm looking at you, qemu), but getting data in and out, and controlling them. some feature requests, if i may ;)

    # take screenshot
    # this should do the right thing(TM) and take a screenshot of the logged-in user session, which may not necessarily be the console
    lume screenshot  [-o  | -]

    # execute command
    lume exec  [--as-user ]  [args]

    # copy files in and out
    lume cp : 
    lume cp  :

    # run clone as new VM
    # this should appropriately roll the MAC address, IPs, and reseed any RNGs, of course
    lume run --clone  

Can you clone a VM while it's running?

The ability to resume a VM within You may need to preinstall an agent (a la Parallel/VMware Tools) to make sure this is seamless and fast.

Yes, FOSS is generally used in this context. Though I have occasionally seen OSS used too.

- FOSS: Free / open source software

- OSS: Open source software.

Personally I wouldn’t recommend macOS as a server OS unless you’re doing something that is specifically macOS dependent (like automated e2e testing of macOS / iOS software).

Everything server related that is easy to do on Linux or BSD is at least an order of magnitude more painful on macOS. And like Windows, you cannot run it headless. In fact Windows actually had better support for running headless than macOS despite macOS’s unix heritage.

Also if you need to run macOS on anything other than spare hardware, then expect to pay a premium. This is particularly true of hosting macOS instances in the cloud.

Every time I’ve needed to run macOS as a server, which is a depressingly large amount of times over the years — I’ve had to do that in every job bar one — it’s been a painful process and I’ve had to accept compromises to what would normally be best practices.

Stuff like Tart does make things a little easier. But given how locked down macOS and its hardware are, it really should be something Apple gave a lot more love to themselves. Instead they went the other way and discontinued Mac Server, albeit that was some number of years ago now. And things haven’t gotten any better since.

As a battle hardened unix greybeard, I’d still prefer to administrate enterprise Windows server over “enterprise macOS” servers.

That all said, for any hobby projects, anything is fair game. So if you have spare hardware then go for it. Just don’t expect it to be as “fun” as running Debian on a Rasberry Pi or similar other traditional hobby set ups

No harm done. Anyone, like myself, who read past the title would have understood the submission just fine.