>What does this offer that BSD-mutant MacOS native on Apple Silicon lacks? The ability to test applications in a native FreeBSD environment? This is just runni

>What does this offer that BSD-mutant MacOS native on Apple Silicon lacks? The ability to test applications in a native FreeBSD environment? This is just running another OS within macOS same as one might run Windows or Linux images. It's useful for development all on one system, certain kinds of isolated deployments and so on. Also I use it for doing another layer of runs of certain things before pushing out to deployment, you can virtualize a router/firewall like OPNsense or VyOS for example, load your live config, and experiment before sending it out to metal. This is just someone playing around with yet another way to do it. I use VMware myself right now on an x86 Mac but there are lots of choices and it's nice to see more stuff heading over to AS as well. From your comment though it's not clear to me if you're confusing this with running an alternative OS on the metal, as the Asahi Linux folks are working on? If that's what you were thinking, then the answer would be that longer term having Linux and FreeBSD on AS hardware could help extend its life (Apple won't support them forever anymore then they do any Macs), Mac Minis at least might be useful little appliance systems (eyeballing numbers so far an M1 Mini could in principle compare favorably as a firewall say to a lot of x86 systems in the same power/heat/physical size), and of course some people simply would prefer to stick to another OS they're at home in but also like the Apple hardware. Nothing wrong with that.