Creating a macOS Virtual Machine on Linux Mint

Tagged with apple, linux on January 14, 2025

As I’ve stated, more than once, I would never buy anything Apple. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t use anything made by Apple, especially when it’s free. The recent iPad my wife gave me is something I consider free. I’ve recently explored something else I would consider free: Running a macOS virtual machine on Linux.

For me, both macOS and Windows are operating systems limited by their corporate owners. You get one operating system and one desktop environment for each of them, and your hardware has to comply with strict requirements. With Linux, there are several full-fledged desktop environments for various Linux distributions. There are also several standalone window managers.

I will never use macOS as my primary operating system, and I will never again use Windows as my primary operating system. Unless something better than Linux comes along, one distribution or another will always be my primary operating system. Everything else will be relegated to a virtual machine.

Installing macOS Virtual Machines on Linux

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve followed one tutorial after another in trying to get macOS running in a virtual machine. Eventually, I discovered Quickemu, a project I completely overlooked. Although the project supports several macOS versions, I’ve only managed to successfully install Catalina so far.

Like Virtual Machine Manager, Quickemu is a frontend for QEMU, an open source machine emulator and virtualizer. QEMU itself harnesses KVM, the kernel-based virtual machine. This is probably the best we can get on home computers.

Other Operating Systems

Despite being disparaged by some online technology nerds, Virtualbox works well enough for Windows and Linux guests. Well, most of them. There are some Linux distributions that will only work on bare metal. Virtualbox is easily configurable, once you understand what everything does. It’s easy to make copies and save and restore snapshots. Working with Quickemu and Virtual Machine Manager isn’t as easy.

I have no need for Windows, since I don’t use any Windows applications, and I only create Linux virtual machines for testing purposes. For my purposes, using anything other than Virtualbox is just too much work. The only reason I’m using Quickemu is that it’s the only way I can install any version of macOS as a virtual machine, and each installation consumes more than two hours of my life.

Since I’m merely studying the macOS interface, I’m sure I’ll abandon this project eventually.

Image by Original: Rob Janoff, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons