I’m not going to go through the installation in detail, because Steve Sande does a fabulous job of it. Let’s Do This! UTM Gallery of OS Virtual Machines Of course, that’s all the motivation I needed to proceed. This makes this a fun experiment, possibly a colossal waste of time, and when I’m done I’ll have something I don’t need. As I mentioned before, Windows on ARM isn’t really supported to do this, and even if I succeed, apps would have to be compiled for 64-bit ARM to run on it.

I found an article by Steve Sande on the OWC blog where he walks through the steps to configure UTM on an M1 Mac, and install Windows on ARM for free, legitimately. The value that UTM brings to QEMU is that it’s a graphical user interface not requiring a plethora of command line options and flags, so the learning curve is much more gentle. Under the hood of UTM is QEMU, a decades-old, free and open source emulation software that is widely used and actively maintained. Sadly, it requires you to jailbreak your iOS device so I declined that opportunity but running this on macOS Big Sur sounded like good fun. And then I discovered an open source virtual machine app I hadn’t heard of called UTM which runs on M1 and even on iOS. I did a bit of poking around looking into what virtual machine software runs on the M1s and discovered that VirtualBox from Oracle and the commercial software VMware Fusion do not, but Parallels Desktop does. When I asked him about this limitation of the M1 he said he didn’t see it as an issue (not sure why) but that he hadn’t yet looked into whether the open source virtual machine software VirtualBox would run on the M1, at least to run a Linux distribution (or distro as the cool kids say.) He has touted the Mac as the best platform because he can run macOS, Linux, and Windows all on one piece of hardware. Knightwise’s mantra is “making technology work for you” and the center of that is being a slider who can use the best tool for the job, rather than being fanatically attached to one company’s technology (like some people we know). I was actually surprised that in Knightwise’s recording about how much value he’s getting from his M1 MacBook Air, he never mentioned that as a downside. I talked on the show a while back about how the one downside to an M1 Mac is that you can’t run Windows, or at least not without a lot of faffing about.

Windows emulator for mac m1