If work gives me a macbook, is a full screen Linux VM a good experience?

[ack]

I’m a user of free operating systems. I find macos hard. I could learn it, but I have no personal interest in Apple’s proprietary ecosystem and I have no professional interest either. I get paid for knowing about Linux.

However some companies run production on Linux, but require macos macbooks because of desktop IT standardisation. I’m wondering how viable it is for me to treat a macbook as just providing a platform for me to run a (ARM64 I guess) Debian VM, perhaps running under UTM.

Preferably fullscreen, hooked up to a 4k monitor, without feeling like I was running at 5Hz refresh rate.

Video conferencing could happen in macos still, but most time is spent in my dev environment which should be in Linux.

Anyone doing such things? How is it going?

Alternatively I could do what I’ve done to date, which is only accept roles that allow native Linux on the desktop.

There are other options, perhaps a remote VM running in AWS, however my part of the world isn’t known for universal high bandwidth low latency home Internet. That could be my fallback, if UTM didn’t work well.

[dr.d3x]

Yes I use a Fedora vm with UTM near daily. You’ll notice its not bare metal but its not unpleasant. There is a known issue with some versions of Mesa breaking virgl so make sure you are using latest if you want GPU acceleration. I notice a bit of screen tearing at 4k so I lowered the resolution. I’ve not used it myself but I have read there is a way to run VMs with UTM using apple’s virtualization backend which will let you run x86 programs via rosetta on a arm64 vm.