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A bit off topic but does anyone have a good lightweight vm gui that uses the new framework w/Monterey? Fusion and Parallels are expensive (and I personally don

A bit off topic but does anyone have a good lightweight vm gui that uses the new framework w/Monterey? Fusion and Parallels are expensive (and I personally don’t love the interface anyway), and I’ve found UTM a pain to setup. I’d like to just take an Ubuntu ISO (or macOS image) choose a disk size and be on with it. Preferably with support for snapshots, but not required. I spent a while searching for projects but most are no more than (not actively maintained) proof of concepts.

jbverschoor 5y ago
UTM
saagarjha 5y ago
Self promotion, but I guess you’re specifically asking for it so I hope you’ll let it slide: https://github.com/saagarjha/VirtualApple https://github.com/saagarjha/VirtualApple. I’ve been using it for development so it’s “actively maintained” in the sense that if it breaks I’ll go fix it because I need it to work :P Do note that the framework for Linux asks for a kernel+disk rather than an ISO. I don’t support it at the moment (the project is macOS-focused) but it wouldn’t be too hard to add support for.
WesternEdge 5y ago
Fusion is free now for personal use.
- e40 5y ago
  Interesting. I wonder if this is because it has really sucked in the last 6 months and this is some sort of hail mary? I have 2 machines with the latest VMware Fusion on it. An iMac (Intel) and a Mac Pro (2013). Both ran all versions of macOS flawlessly until a few months ago. Big Sur and Monterey have massive issues. I couldn't install from scratch anything Monterey. I had random hangs, installing new macOS guests. Just so many issues. It forced me to try Parallels Pro and I found it works fine. I'm in the process of switching over.
  - WesternEdge 5y ago
    I wonder if Fusion was ever even profitable. I have never met anyone who has independently gone and purchased it. But I've bought licenses for it through work and maybe enough others have too. Maybe it's a loss leader product now, get individuals into it so that they will ask for it at work.
    - rleigh 5y ago
      I (grudgingly) paid for personal copies of both Fusion and Workstation Pro, since I did use both heavily for years. However... my personal opinion of Workstation has taken a nosedive. I've experienced quite a number of really ridiculous bugs, and it appears that the firing of all of the competent maintainers and replacing them with Chinese developers has not done the product quality any favours. Looks like it's been in "cash cow maintenance mode" for almost a decade at this point. Example from last week at work: When I fire up my Linux VMs on Windows 10 Enterprise, I get a black screen. The workaround: enable a nonexistent floppy drive. When the system boots the "floppy drive not present" dialogue box somehow stops the screen blanking out and it works until the virtualised OS power saving turns off the screen. At which point it's dead until you power it down and repeat the floppy trick. There's some really basic bug here, and it's been around for several years. Reported and unaddressed. Same with quite a few other issues I've reported. EFI bugs preventing FreeBSD booting. Segfaults when using the PC beeper on Linux. Really stupid stuff that any basic emulation should be handling. The QA on these products seems to have just gone, and I really resent paying a significant amount of money for bug-ridden poorly-tested software. With Fusion I've seen the same issues that Workstation has for the most part, since other than the UI the codebase is mostly shared. If they want to be able to compete with the OS-provided and free alternatives, they need to up their game and make their product worth paying money for. Right now, it seems like you pay through the nose for something that has a handful of features nothing else offers, but overall is a worse experience.
yuuko11 5y ago
Fusion public beta is currently free.
Tagbert 5y ago
I saw a discussion around this on the macrumors forum. Don’t know much about it yet though. It looks like some usage scenarios have a free license. https://veertu.com/anka-3-m1-arm-macos-type-2-virtualization/ https://veertu.com/anka-3-m1-arm-macos-type-2-virtualization...
djrogers 5y ago
Veertu is essentially a GUI wrapper around virtualization.framework, might want to take a look at that.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  Veertu has probably been around for a decade. It used to be on the Mac App Store even! I wonder why they are lesser known than other desktop virtualization software.
solarkraft 5y ago
> I’ve found UTM a pain to setup Why? I've had some issues with booting before, but in general UTM is the simple QEMU front-end for macOS for me, a lot like Boxes for Gnome.
- upbeat_general 5y ago
  Personally I've tried several linux ISOs and had issues booting and didn't have the resolve to fix it. MacOS VMs I got working but there was a lot of specific setup. There are some things I enjoy fiddling with but VM configs isn't one of them.

jbverschoor 5y ago

UTM

saagarjha 5y ago

Self promotion, but I guess you’re specifically asking for it so I hope you’ll let it slide: https://github.com/saagarjha/VirtualApple https://github.com/saagarjha/VirtualApple. I’ve been using it for development so it’s “actively maintained” in the sense that if it breaks I’ll go fix it because I need it to work :P Do note that the framework for Linux asks for a kernel+disk rather than an ISO. I don’t support it at the moment (the project is macOS-focused) but it wouldn’t be too hard to add support for.

WesternEdge 5y ago

Fusion is free now for personal use.

e40 5y ago
Interesting. I wonder if this is because it has really sucked in the last 6 months and this is some sort of hail mary? I have 2 machines with the latest VMware Fusion on it. An iMac (Intel) and a Mac Pro (2013). Both ran all versions of macOS flawlessly until a few months ago. Big Sur and Monterey have massive issues. I couldn't install from scratch anything Monterey. I had random hangs, installing new macOS guests. Just so many issues. It forced me to try Parallels Pro and I found it works fine. I'm in the process of switching over.
- WesternEdge 5y ago
  I wonder if Fusion was ever even profitable. I have never met anyone who has independently gone and purchased it. But I've bought licenses for it through work and maybe enough others have too. Maybe it's a loss leader product now, get individuals into it so that they will ask for it at work.
  - rleigh 5y ago
    I (grudgingly) paid for personal copies of both Fusion and Workstation Pro, since I did use both heavily for years. However... my personal opinion of Workstation has taken a nosedive. I've experienced quite a number of really ridiculous bugs, and it appears that the firing of all of the competent maintainers and replacing them with Chinese developers has not done the product quality any favours. Looks like it's been in "cash cow maintenance mode" for almost a decade at this point. Example from last week at work: When I fire up my Linux VMs on Windows 10 Enterprise, I get a black screen. The workaround: enable a nonexistent floppy drive. When the system boots the "floppy drive not present" dialogue box somehow stops the screen blanking out and it works until the virtualised OS power saving turns off the screen. At which point it's dead until you power it down and repeat the floppy trick. There's some really basic bug here, and it's been around for several years. Reported and unaddressed. Same with quite a few other issues I've reported. EFI bugs preventing FreeBSD booting. Segfaults when using the PC beeper on Linux. Really stupid stuff that any basic emulation should be handling. The QA on these products seems to have just gone, and I really resent paying a significant amount of money for bug-ridden poorly-tested software. With Fusion I've seen the same issues that Workstation has for the most part, since other than the UI the codebase is mostly shared. If they want to be able to compete with the OS-provided and free alternatives, they need to up their game and make their product worth paying money for. Right now, it seems like you pay through the nose for something that has a handful of features nothing else offers, but overall is a worse experience.

yuuko11 5y ago

Fusion public beta is currently free.

Tagbert 5y ago

I saw a discussion around this on the macrumors forum. Don’t know much about it yet though. It looks like some usage scenarios have a free license. https://veertu.com/anka-3-m1-arm-macos-type-2-virtualization/ https://veertu.com/anka-3-m1-arm-macos-type-2-virtualization...

djrogers 5y ago

Veertu is essentially a GUI wrapper around virtualization.framework, might want to take a look at that.

kccqzy 5y ago
Veertu has probably been around for a decade. It used to be on the Mac App Store even! I wonder why they are lesser known than other desktop virtualization software.

solarkraft 5y ago

> I’ve found UTM a pain to setup Why? I've had some issues with booting before, but in general UTM is the simple QEMU front-end for macOS for me, a lot like Boxes for Gnome.

upbeat_general 5y ago
Personally I've tried several linux ISOs and had issues booting and didn't have the resolve to fix it. MacOS VMs I got working but there was a lot of specific setup. There are some things I enjoy fiddling with but VM configs isn't one of them.