That’s where a bit of hacking comes around. In fact, you won’t be able to run any Linux ISO right away. Bear in mind, this Virtualization framework doesn’t provide all the features that might be present on apps like Parallels. There is an open-source tool named vftool that acts as a wrapper around these APIs so you can use it to run a Linux Virtual Machine. And actually, you can do that, with a bit of hacking around.Īpple allows to create Virtual Machines and run Linux-based operating systems but only through APIs. So If I could set up a Linux box on MacBook like WSL (Windows Substem for Linux) on Windows 10, that will be really amazing. Personally, I don’t need GUI, I just need a Linux terminal. There is also an open-source app named UTM that uses Qemu to run Virtualised Linux instances on MacBook. There are some third-party paid applications like Parallels and VMWare Fusion that allow you to create any kind of Virtual Machine and they are quite good at that. Therefore being able to run Linux VM on my MacBook Air M1 with nearly native speeds, gives me the best of both worlds. At the same time, I also love the new MacBook Air M1 for its hardware.

But at the same time, I do have other hobbies too, like Photography, for which I prefer Photoshop and Lightroom.

Being a backend and DevOps developer I have some serious love for Linux OSes.

The moment I realized that Apple’s MacOS Big Sur has a built-in Virtualization framework that can run Linux OS, I was right away intrigued to try it out.

Apple virtualization framework