Going Ubuntu on an M1 Mac with Multipass: Thanks VM, it's Linux on the desktop

An Apple Silicon version of Canonical's Multipass has arrived, adding another way of firing up Linux on an M1-powered Mac. Although getting a full desktop on an M1 Mac is tricky at present (although not too far off) firing up a virtual machine on the platform allows developers to code against the operating system from the …

[Anonymous Coward]

"While the evolution of WSL... cut the need for Multipass on Windows"

What's the need to begin with? Is anyone doing anything real with WSL besides "porting" things you can already run? Am I to go and install Windows because WSL will now run... actually I don't know. Now a super-duper Windows and Mac emulator for Linux would be nice, but the current trend is to achieve Linux without having to contribute to Linux by feigning "OSS" support while doing nothing but making their own OS's better (Mac & Windows). What I can't understand is that if bridging a divide requires more things Linux, why doesn't Linux just bring them both to it?

While Multipass seems like a 5th element, I'm not sure I'd bother as Mac is Unix enough (although I don't have a MAC so :-/).

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

"Mac is Unix enough" -- Mac IS UNIX: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3678.htm

As to why, well there are a few Linux-only oddities that will not compile on a POSIX system, so I may give this a spin...

[MrBanana]

Re: Why?

For licensing reasons, MacOS was based on a very old BSD implementation. Apple then slathered a load of shite on top to hide everything behind a bunch of black box GUIs. If you want a half decent Unix like experience on MacOS then you will need to download all the modern implementations of the command line tools from brew. Even then, don't expect to be able to update system files and have anything useful happen.

[Kev99]

Hmm...I have a cMP running El Cap with an extra two fairly empty HDD. O wonder if dumping Multipass onto one of those drive will allow Ubuntu 21 to be installed and operate?

[G.Y.]

GUI

Is there a GUI option?