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Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

developer.apple.com

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Re: Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

#31
post #5

UTM works great. Emulate X86, AMD64, or run on Apple Silicon. It's essentially a GUI on top of QEMU. https://mac.getutm.app/

I really like UTM's business model: identical free software if you want it, or 10 bucks if you want automatic updates and to fund UTM development.

Re: Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

#35

Nice, There is official Apple documentation on running Linux GUI in VMs on Mac. So that means it's going to be Aashi linux competitor?

As I understand it, Asahi can run on bare metal of an Mx machine, including custom hardware/firmware due to their reverse engineering efforts. Running aarch64 Linux within a VM only needs to work with the simplified virtual hardware exposed by the VM.

Re: Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

#36

compiling curl today on linux, I see Apple has an internal SSL/TLS curl-7.81.0$ ./configure --help | grep -i apple --with-secure-transport enable Apple OS native SSL/TLS MSFT is adding new signing keys to build and boot Ubuntu. Perhaps Apple wants to play, too and add their own signing keys to build and boot linux, openssl and libssh. Let no crucial technology fall into the hands of the un-corporate?

SecureTransport is a system library on Apple operating systems that implements TLS. It doesn’t exist on Linux. The configure help output is showing it on Linux because it doesn’t filter the list of options based on the OS you’re running on. (Nor should it, since you might hypothetically want to cross-compile a binary for a different operating system than the one you’re running on.)

Re: Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

#37
post #17
post #12

The year of desktop Linux has arrived, where all major desktop platforms run Linux distributions inside virtual machines.

The only problem: becoming root doesn't mean you now control the device (you paid for).

We've sort of been at this point for a long time, though, the abstraction bar is just being shifted up.

Previously, the bar was at the firmware level, where you will never fully control the black boxes governing the security chips, DRM implementations and real time OSes running on the microcontrollers inside the CPU.

Now the OS (especially on Apple devices) is almost becoming like the firmware layer itself, so deeply integrated and locked to the machine, but with the freedom to run other OSes/environments on top.

At least you can (usually) still unlock the OS level...

Re: Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

#39

The fact that Apple is working on virtualisation shows that there is a user demand for running alternative OSes on a Mac desktop. And yet, instead of opening up their hardware just a bit (by making available some hardware literature on their ARM SoC) to system developers, they'd rather offer a more convoluted way of running other OSes only on their terms and control. It's all about having control over your personal d…

I believe the bulk of the demand is coming primarily from a need to run Linux containers (e.g. docker images) than out of a desire to boot Linux directly. While there is demand for the latter (as demonstrated by the herculean efforts going into Asahi Linux), most people buying Macs are probably there at least partially for macOS and the ecosystem it fits into, as well as for the ability to run commercial software pac…

I would say people don't care too much and take the path of least resistance. If it was an out of the box option they would definitely love a system with good hardware and a configurable os.

When I spent some time and installed Linux on my MacBook Pro 2015 some people came asking for instructions (and were mostly deterred by the compiling needed to build a driver for the webcam).

Macbooks are unrivaled for their hardware (pretty much any other laptop sucks), the software is meh and keeps getting worse.

Re: Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac

#40

Wow, you can use Rosetta to run x86 Linux binaries inside the VM on ARM? That seems pretty awesome. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Only on Ventura, which isn't out yet (and quite frankly, the pre-release version is still a huge mess)
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