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A comment on Ask HN: What's the best virtual Linux desktop experience on macOS for devs?.

Re:Ask HN: What's the best virtual Linux desktop experience ... by bigyabai on Thursday January 22, 2026 @05:43PM (#46726095)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What's the best virtual Linux desktop experience ... by Jtsummers on Thursday January 22, 2026 @06:09PM (#46726301)
> 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!).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What's the best virtual Linux desktop experience ... by darkteflon on Friday January 23, 2026 @07:07PM (#46739649)
I can definitely see this working for some people and have tried it in the past. Orbstack - which I’m running for Docker anyway - makes it trivial. However, without wanting to get off-topic, I’ve carefully considered my needs and I know what they are, and I think there are quite a lot of people in my situation. Enough to warrant asking for peoples’ thoughts.
[ Parent | on HN ]