congrats on the open sourcing and launching! beyond the desire to run VMs in "1 command", i don't quite get the reasoning behind this project. could you elucidate? like, besides running macOS VMs, how is it different from lima, colima, and friends? the name lume is quite unfortunate.

the hard part about running VMs isn't really how to launch them (well, ahem, i'm looking at you, qemu), but getting data in and out, and controlling them. some feature requests, if i may ;)

    # take screenshot
    # this should do the right thing(TM) and take a screenshot of the logged-in user session, which may not necessarily be the console
    lume screenshot <vm name> [-o <file.png> | -]

    # execute command
    lume exec <vm name> [--as-user <user>] <command> [args]

    # copy files in and out
    lume cp <vm name>:<vm path> <local path>
    lume cp <local path> <vm name>:<vm path>

    # run clone as new VM
    # this should appropriately roll the MAC address, IPs, and reseed any RNGs, of course
    lume run --clone <clone name> <vm name>

The ability to resume a VM within < 1 second would be useful for on-demand workflows without waiting for a full VM bootup sequence, similar to how you can get a firecracker microVM into the state you want, snapshot it.. then clone as you wish, and resume back into the guest.

You may need to preinstall an agent (a la Parallel/VMware Tools) to make sure this is seamless and fast.

Would this allow to run a near-native speed VM with a decent-speed Docker server inside, and thus allow to have an Orb-like speed for docker containers?

How does this compare to Lima[1] and Tart[2], which are similar?

Also, would it be possible to run BSDs with this?

[1] https://lima-vm.io

[2] https://tart.run

Would you mind educating me about use cases for having one or even multiple MacOS VMs on an apple silicon machine please?

Can you use to launch an Intel VM on Apple Silicone and visa versa? I’m interested in doing this so I can compile C++ applications for different architectures on MacOS. Do you know of any other “easy” methods?

I read GPU and USB passthrough somewhere and did not believe it

Looks interesting! I’ve been playing with UTM to do aarch64 VMs and I even cooked up a little Sinatra server to do some AppleScript to reboot the VM and do some other things on the host. I’ll look at this as a more robust solution as to be completely honest, UTM has left a lot to be desired at least for virtualization.

So will this ever be able to run a lightweight windows vm?

I would be interested in running older macOS versions in a VM, but those would be x64-based and an Apple Silicon host is impractical for that.

This looks interesting but unless there's a vagrant plugin to use it, I'm pretty unlikely to spend any serious time using it.

> What would make you replace UTM/Multipass/Docker Desktop with this?

Just checked my list of VMs in UTM; 5 Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora), 9 Mac OS X/OS X/macOS (versions stretching back from Tiger to Sequoia), and 10 Windows (XP through 11). Lume would need to support not only Windows but also emulation in order to consider a move.

It's a good project, but it just has too few built-in images.

great! how does this compare to orbstack?

    brew install orbstack
    orb
    # you're now running in an ubuntu VM

would be nice if you can bind ports!

not really stoked about the name since there are a couple other projects named lume:

- https://lume.land/

The project looks cool though

The title of this post took me about 3 attempts to parse, because "OS" is more strongly bound to Operating System in this context (but presumably it's supposed to read as Open Source)

I wish it was possible to run a Debian VM on iOS.

For laptops, there are many nice options. But for tablets, the latest iPads are currently unmatched at under 600 grams for a 13" tablet. So I would love to use one of those.

Is macOS up to scratch to be used as a server these days? Last I checked it would always run into trouble / randomly reboot / become unavailable whenever a new OS update became available. Admittedly this is about 2 years ago.

If so, this would be great. Particularly to repurpose older macs.

I know the Mac hardware is pretty trick, but man, I do most of my dev on Linux and have a Framework Laptop (AMD) running Ubuntu; it's just really nice for dev stuff to work the same way it does on our production environment...

Also, the frequency and size and time to install MacOS updates - like these computers are blazingly fast from the cpus to the SSDs - after an update has downloaded, what could it possibly be doing that takes 30+ minutes to install? I've never had to wait for an apt-get upgrade that long.

Name clash with the not very well known Lua library, you should strongly consider changing the name https://github.com/rxi/lume