VirtualBox VirtualBox is a free and open source virtual machine software from Oracle. Choose Linux as the type of installation. Here are the best virtual machine apps for Mac. Add a name for your virtual copy of Linux. These steps assume VirtualBox has already been installed on your machine: Click New in VirtualBox. If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject. To install a virtual copy of Linux on your Mac using the open-source VirtualBox, do the following. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware.

Canonical 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. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else. Multipass is a free VM software that aims to help you create Linux instances on Apple M1 without any hassle.

Linux vm on mac