> The issue is that of course Apple computers that are large enough to run VMs are… expensive.
Expensive compared to what? UTM uses Apple Virtualization Framework, which lets the guest VM only occupy as much memory as it's actually using (instead of reserving all of its available memory). This means it's viable to run a Linux VM on e.g. an 8GB RAM MacBook Air.
EDIT: I recall vaguely something about it being a problem with Linux guest VMs because it aggressively uses RAM as a file system cache. So it'll just fill up RAM to the max when reading from disk, and overwrite this if it's later needed by applications.
The cost of RAM on Apple machines is far above the market price for the same RAM in the PC world. Apple quotes a loss leader with a minimum configuration, but as soon as you up the specs to something usable by a developer for VMs or LLMs, the price has ballooned.
Expensive compared to what? UTM uses Apple Virtualization Framework, which lets the guest VM only occupy as much memory as it's actually using (instead of reserving all of its available memory). This means it's viable to run a Linux VM on e.g. an 8GB RAM MacBook Air.