Aliases to tie commands on the virtual machine to the host OS.“Canonical wants to get developers running on Linux faster than any other option on the market, and the Multipass team has helped accomplish that.”Īlong with the addition of support, Multipass 1.8 also brings in some useful features that include: In the announcement, Canonical product manager Nathan Hart mentions: Multipass is a free VM software that aims to help you create Linux instances on Apple M1 without any hassle.Ĭanonical announced the release of their latest Multipass 1.8 that finally adds support for Apple M1, making it the only viable choice as a cross-platform virtual machine software that helps you run Ubuntu Linux. Canonical’s Multipass 1.8 is a Free Virtual Machine Program With M1 Support Moreover, you need to purchase a license to use parallels, which could be expensive. Hence, pretty limited options that give you cross-platform support. So, your best bet to run virtual machines is using parallels or UTM (free) on macOS. However, that is still in closed beta and not feasible for users.Īnd, when it comes to VirtualBox, it does not support the ARM platform yet and has no plans for it. While you have tools like VMware and VirtualBox to create virtual machines, it does not work on ARM-based Apple M1 silicon.Īs of now, VMware is slowly adding support for its products to work on Apple M1. Unfortunately, getting a Linux instance up and running on M1 devices is not a straightforward task.

It is convenient for most developers to spin up a Linux VM instance and continue working on their system without interruptions. Ever since Apple introduced its M1 chips, numerous efforts have been made to run Linux on it.Įven though that is still in progress, Canonical seems to have made it possible to run Linux (Ubuntu) as virtual machines (VMs) on Apple M1.

Apple virtualization software