I used this a couple of weeks ago to install Windows 11 ARM on macOS (Ventura on a new M2), looking to replace Fusion. It was disappointing:<p>* Integration tools like copy/paste between VM and host, or file sharing, didn't work<p>* Graphics constantly glitched, often going to a grey screen. There seemed no way to recover, and I had to force restart the VM<p>The drivers / assistant tools have a 2012 date on them.<p>I'm aware it's a free product and I have no right to expect anything (and I don't; I went back to Fusion.) And perhaps the situation would improve if I or others financially supported the project, which seems a better response to issues :) Nevertheless I went in hoping I could replace the commercial VM solutions, which on Mac have required yearly updates that deliver almost no new value, with something open source -- and I can't yet.
UTM is great, and once snapshot capability is added [1] it will become my default recommendation for sure. Until then sticking with Parallels. NOTE: An unofficial snapshot manager exists [2].<p>1: <a href="https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5484">https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/5484</a><p>2: <a href="https://github.com/Metamogul/UTM-Snapshot-Manager">https://github.com/Metamogul/UTM-Snapshot-Manager</a>
The biggest problem with UTM is that it works great for some people, and works terribly for others.<p>Seriously, scroll up and down on the threads here on this page, and you'll see a bunch of people saying "I wish I could use UTM, but it doesn't work / is unusably slow" and a bunch of people replying "weird, it works great for me."<p>My experience: UTM has literally never worked for me. I just tried to do a bog standard Ubuntu ARM install on my M1 2021 Mac, following the guide here <a href="https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/</a> and it failed. I'm staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen.<p>Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work.<p>I even paid $10 for UTM on the Mac App Store, like a sucker, hoping that I could get some tech support that way, but the only tech support channel is their Discord, which is full of randos saying "lol, works for me, skill issue."<p>My recommendation: Give UTM a try! Either you'll love it, and save a bunch of money, or it won't work at all, like me, and you'll just have to pay $100/year for Parallels. Parallels is probably gonna just work.<p>If Parallels doesn't work for you, you can reach out to them and talk to a person who can help, because they want you to keep paying to renew your Parallels license. They're incentivized to help you succeed.
Work issued me an M1 MacBook Pro, but all my development is under Linux. Linux has been my preferred environment since the late 90s. While I find the MacBook Pro hardware to be nice, I find macos clumsy and frustrating, and my productivity severely drops.<p>So, I run Fedora (aarch64) under UTM full screen. It works acceptably well, and I often forget I'm on a mac.<p>I just wish macos would get out of the way, and not sometimes knock you out of full screen mode.
UTM has been a solid hypervisor for me for the past 2 years, and it's received several great functionality and feature improvements over that time too.<p>But perhaps my favourite aspect of UTM is that it stands for Universal Turing Machine (arguably the best name ever for a virtualization product).
What I don't like about Parallels and VMWare, is that they push all of those integrations between OS, like openings Windows from Windows in macOS. Or opening some documents from macOS right in Windows. I prefer to have VM isolated from my main macOS. So it is always going through all configurations and trying to figure out what I need to turn off.
I realize that "for iOS" comes from the github project blurb., but I think that it's pretty misleading. The iOS installation options are basically a jailbreak (impossible on recent CPU/iOS versions) or semi-tethering and re-loading/signing the app every few days.<p><a href="https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/#summary" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.getutm.app/installation/ios/#summary</a>
If you're running VMs on Mac for a development environment what you want is OrbStack: <a href="https://orbstack.dev/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://orbstack.dev/</a>
Someone pointed me to Lima which is a bit like wsl2 for macos: <a href="https://lima-vm.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://lima-vm.io</a><p>Not sure what is used underneath but it worked great for me.
UTM is great for basic stuff but performance has been abysmal so not really viable as a workhorse in my day to day.<p>Nothing beats Parallels on Mac, worth every penny.
I love UTM.<p>It works great for my needs. I mostly develop infrastructure automation and configuration tooling and I run all my VMs in terminal mode. The wide availability of arm64 distros and OSes makes this easy.<p>I also use it to run a tiny pi hole instance when I'm traveling.
Two things I love about UTM:<p>- The serial window.<p>- The ability to truly lock the mouse to the window.<p>I wanted to use it on my work provided machine, but when hooked up to my monitor, the performance was lacking (21:9, 1440p). Performance also felt the same across an M1 MacBook Air, an M2 MacBook Air, and an M2 MacBook Pro, so it felt like something was up, not that the machine just couldn't handle it.<p>Sadly, Parallels was the only thing I tried that performed well when connected to that monitor.
It only lacks support to spin up/down multiple VMs via a simple configuration file (like Vagrant, for instance). If I want to spin up a small lab with N VMs with specific private IPs and the like, UTM is not the most dev-friendly tool. I think there's place for some tool in between UTM and QEMU.
I can't say enough nice things about UTM. Especially if you've ever tried using QEMU manually, you'll appreciate how much heavy lifting UTM is doing for you. (It's basically impossible to run QEMU "correctly" on macOS. It randomly crashes, issues non-existent instructions, or freezes in IO for seconds at a time, all of which are problems UTM doesn't have.)<p>Yes, I imagine there are fancier commercial VMs out there, but UTM is free and open source, and it works great. (I'm not a light user, either, I use it for Linux kernel work, and never had any cause to complain.)
Since this is essentially QEMU: does anyone here have a working build of the QEMU guest utilities for Windows? No matter what one tries, they're <i>all</i> severely broken. Or alternatively, <i>anything</i> that can run Windows 7 x32 on an Apple Silicon machine.<p>(Why? Because I need to run Samsung ODIN, which is windows-only)
I think what would be amazing would be if one day it is possible to run macOS on an Apple Silicon iPad. This seems like it would be something that many people would want, so I guess there are technical issues preventing this. In another thread, the absence of JIT support has been mentioned for example.
I’ve been using it to run Kali Linux ARM edition for the Pen-200 course. And it works really well, everything just feels snappy. My only grape is the scaling and hi-res screens is less refined than for example vm-guest tools from VMware. But these can be fixed from the guest vm itself.
It’s impressive for what it is. But after noodling around with UTM and Fusion, I subscribed to Parallels, and it’s on a whole different level. I used it years and years ago to emulate x86 on PowerPC Macs, and it’s the gold standard. Night and day.
I used UTM extensively when creating an almost-no-touch tool for developers to setup their Macbook devices at the company I work for.<p>There's really no other convenient way to do this. It was awesome to be able to run the tool on a fresh MacOS install, test the effects, make some changes, then do it all over again with little fuss.<p>Thanks UTM!
I wish Apple would drop the 2 VM limit for virtualized macOS.<p>UTM is really nice for running Xcode as a build server, but being limited to two VMs sucks. I build lots of software with old macOS versions because I still support macOS versions that Apple no longer supports.
This is a great reminder for me to get off the Parallels "Give me $70 every year for absolutely nothing" train. Thank you <i>@eliot</i>!<p>Has anyone found a reasonably painless way to migrate their disk images from Parallels to UTM?