Does any Mac-user here have any experience of the latest VirtualBox ARM64 edition for running either Windows or Linux on an Apple-silicon Mac?
Any recommendations/advice/warnings welcomed. I have no experience of Windows 10 or 11 and would need to acquire one or the other. Similarly, for Linux, I would probably go for Elementary OS as being the most Mac-like, unless there is good reason not to!
Mark
I’m running a different combination, VMWare Fusion on the big one (that’s still an Intel/x86 iMac), virtualizing Windows 11. That same VM wouldn’t work on my M-Series MBA.
It has to be all the same architecture, e.g. x86 Mac + x86 VM-Server + x86 Windows OR ARM Mac + ARM VM-Server + ARM Windows. Or Linux. (The reason for this is rather technical, in short: Because performance would suck. A lot.)
Installing Windows 10 is pretty pointless in 2025, unless that’s a requirement for anything you need to test. Or if you can’t afford emetics.
Go with 11. Download the ISO image, mount it as a CD / DVD in your VM, let the installer do its installer thing, after that follow the instructions of your VM on how to install their version of “VM Tools” inside of Windows. The user experience gets much better after this step.
I don’t know how good the DirectX support of VirtualBox is nowadays (or if it even has one), but Parallels or VMWare basically run Windows like on native hardware. Because that’s what happens, if you think about it…
Oh, and expect to spend half a day disabling / uninstalling all the telemetry, ads and bloatware. Or maybe just don’t give that VM a network connection. (Not sure if that’s feasible in your scenario, maybe you need the internet there.)
ADD: The range of Linux distros is probably limited to Asahi on Apple Silicon, if you want decent performance.
Parallels here and it works great.
I’m/have run virtuals of Win 10, 11, Tahoe Beta, Mint with no issues.
I can understand having some Windows capability but wondering why you would want to install Linux on a machine that (at least at the command line level) presents a UNIX interface. If there is a command line utility that is not provided as part of macOS or the GNU version is better I grab it using Homebrew at http://brew.sh.
OK. Thanks all, but this is where I’m at. I don’t need either Windows or Linux. Some time ago, I ran Windows under VirtualBox on one of my laptops, but since then used CrossOver to run Scriv-Windows to be able to help my collaborator/friend with any Windows-related issues she encountered. For a couple of years now, I haven’t even done that.
Then, for some years now, I have been wanting to try Linux, purely to see how I got on with it—at one point I even thought about buying a laptop just for that, but decided my money had better uses elsewhere.
Then a couple of days ago, I came across info that VirtualBox now had an ARM64 based version that could run on my Mac Mini, so I started thinking about installing it and setting up Windows and/or Linux partitions. So my question is actually if anyone has experience of VirtualBox under Apple Silicon.
I’m not interested in Parallels or VMWare Fusion… not going to spend money on it. Though, @RuffPub do you run Mint on your Apple Silicon machines or your Intel machines (@November_Sierra’s response suggests it wouldn’t work on the former)?
@reepicheep, even less am I interested in command line utilities; the interest is to try out Linux as an alternative to MacOS, but without having a dedicated machine for it.
As for Asahi Linux, from my reading, it seems that you don’t need virtualisation software to install it as it creates its own boot partition directly when installed under MacOS. If that is the case, that might be the way to go… I’ll give it some thought. I can always go back to CrossOver if I need to run Windows software.
Mark
Hi,
Typed without thinking. I have Asahi running on the Apple Silicon MBP, and Mint on the Intel Mac.
The Mint install is by the more useable install at present. I’m about to play with another distro on the Intel beast.
I’m a bit annoyed with myself. I’m doing a knock down and rebuild on the house we bought in March and have most of my gear in long term storage, including my second Intel MBP, I could really do with it at present for another project.
I should have another look at VirtualBox. I used it last year for on device development of WordPress sites but dropped it in favor of Local which is far easier.
Don’t forget open-source and easy to install UTM, it can run both ARM and Intel VMs, and is more “native” than VirtualBox.
brew install utm
or
brew install utm@beta
They have a built-in gallery with a bunch of different Linuxes to insta-download…
I had wanted to use it to install ARM Arch so I can test Omarchy https://omarchy.org, the new hotness in Linux desktop at the moment. But I have no time for playing at the moment…
Thanks. I’ve downloaded VirtualBox but haven’t installed it yet; I’m hanging fire on that one to try UTM.
I started by installing the stable version via the MacApp Store to make things easy. I managed to install Arch Linux, which resulted in reams of text in console and then a command-line prompt, which got me nowhere as I didn’t know what to do next.
When it comes to the others: Debian? Ubuntu? Fedora? Kali?… hard to know which one to go for, made more difficult as they had to be downloaded rather than installed directly, unlike Arch.
I was looking at Kali, but it was late and was going to take too long to download, so I gave up.
In the meantime, you modified your post to point out the Homebrew install of UTM including the latest beta, something that slipped my mind, so I’ll come back to it. Mind you, I presume that with the Homebrew download, I’d have to work out how to run it from Ghostty as it won’t be in the Applications folder and I don’t know if I can access it with Spotlight (my usual way with Apps).
I also looked at Omarchy, but that looks to me like something that’d take time to get to grips with. In the meantime I have plenty to keep me occupied, including seeing how I can convert all the work I’ve done in the Typst web-app into a Scrivener template!
But I’ll reinstall UTM through Homebrew and have another go at installing a Linux Distro, but which one remains to be investigated.
Mark
Yeah, definitely DON’T use Arch – it is famous for being in-at-the-deepend you must build everything yourself from first principles. I consider myself a geek, and relatively good with Linux as all my experiment workstation in my lab run Ubuntu or Debian and I normally have to fix them (as you know in China, my staff and students all use windows, so I get to be Linux guru…), but Arch is daunting for me (though the arch wiki is totally awesome, great for fixing issues with any Linux). Also it seems ARM Arch is not well supported, not updated since 2022 and an unofficial ARM build (one that can work with UTM) is even more difficult to set up than normal arch…
There are two major strands of Linux these days: static releases and rolling releases. Static releases, Debian/Ubuntu being the classic examples, are considered highly stable because they wait relatively long times to update their packages only on a major release (unless there is a security issue which are patched quickly). Every X years this new release comes (Debian 11 becomes 12, Ubuntu 22.04 becomes 24.04 etc). Debian drives me a bit nuts as you can see some essential bug fix in a program you use but still need to wait 2 years till you can use it. Ubunut is faster, they have regular unstable point releases and also have HWE packages which keep the kernel closer to the latest release. I use Ubuntu and Debian mostly because that is what some software I use recommends.
Rolling releases have no major release, they just keep rolling in updates as they come along. There is no arch 25.0, it is just Arch. I don’t know much about them, if I was to run Linux on my personal machine, I would certainly choose them as I like getting the latest features earlier and accept bleeding edges. I’d probably use Arch on x64, though if i was to step away from Apple I’d still prefer ARM hardware (apple silicon just rocks), so perhaps I need something that can ARM properly…
Homebrew does install GUI apps to /Applications – it has a totally brilliant system called casks which are full GUI apps and install exactly as if you downloaded a .dmg. or .pkg and moves them to /Applications for you (want Scrivener, MS Word and LibreOffice in one go: brew install scrivener libreoffice microsoft-word – sooooo easy). You can, and should IMO, install almost all GUI apps using homebrew, as it makes it easy to uninstall (--zap even tries to remove all the support files an app may install), see a list of what you installed, update them all easily in one go etc. Homebrew even supports fonts: brew install font-alegreya font-stix.
I’ve just installed Ubuntu 24.04 ARM (Rosetta) on my M series MBP using Parallels. Stable but a bit of faffing around will be needed to install Lutris by the looks of it.