I run NixOS within VMWare Fusion (Mitchell Hashimoto has posted something similar https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config) in my M4 Max MBP. It runs pretty well but may hit the battery life sometimes. There are some weird stuff that happens with their GPU accelaration and random Fusion crashes sometimes. I patched Hyprland locally in my config due to a weird (but documented) issue with their GPU accelaration implementation https://github.com/AndrewBastin/nixos-config/blob/main/modul...
I have tested Fusion, Parallels and UTM and Fusion seemed to be the most stable for me.
Why not just virtualize Linux for the terminal, and let macOS handle hardware acceleration and desktop tasks?
The Linux desktop experience on Apple Silicon isn't up to par with what macOS can offer you, and lacks OEM drivers like AMD, Intel and Nvidia hardware has. If you're not willing to run Asahi and you don't want to use macOS anymore, you might want to start looking at alternative hardware.
> Why not just virtualize Linux for the terminal, and let macOS handle hardware acceleration and desktop tasks?
This is more or less what I do, but when you happen to want a Linux GUI you end up using XQuartz which works fine, but doesn't exactly play well with the rest of macOS's windowing system (copy/paste works though!).
I run NixOS within VMWare Fusion (Mitchell Hashimoto has posted something similar https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config) in my M4 Max MBP. It runs pretty well but may hit the battery life sometimes. There are some weird stuff that happens with their GPU accelaration and random Fusion crashes sometimes. I patched Hyprland locally in my config due to a weird (but documented) issue with their GPU accelaration implementation https://github.com/AndrewBastin/nixos-config/blob/main/modul...
I have tested Fusion, Parallels and UTM and Fusion seemed to be the most stable for me.
Why not just virtualize Linux for the terminal, and let macOS handle hardware acceleration and desktop tasks?
The Linux desktop experience on Apple Silicon isn't up to par with what macOS can offer you, and lacks OEM drivers like AMD, Intel and Nvidia hardware has. If you're not willing to run Asahi and you don't want to use macOS anymore, you might want to start looking at alternative hardware.
> Why not just virtualize Linux for the terminal, and let macOS handle hardware acceleration and desktop tasks?
This is more or less what I do, but when you happen to want a Linux GUI you end up using XQuartz which works fine, but doesn't exactly play well with the rest of macOS's windowing system (copy/paste works though!).
> The direction of travel with MacOS itself is troubling. Ads, bugs, dark patterns.
Where is macOS showing you ads? And what "dark patterns" are you referring to?