Good news for owners of Mac with Apple Silicon chip: with macOS Ventura it will also be possible to run applications written for x86 architecture processors in virtual machines running Linux. This will be possible thanks to the extension of the compatibility of Rosetta 2, the software that acts as an “interpreter” between the x86 apps and Apple chips, which are based on ARM architecture, precisely to virtualized environments. To clarify: the operating system itself will not be affected by this change, so only native ARM Linux builds will continue to be run.
Broadly speaking, the way to enable this new integration is relatively simple – it will be enough create a shared directory between the native operating system and the virtual machine, then just type a series of shell commands in Linux to configure everything.
Interestingly, the same command set also allows you to enable Rosette on ARM chips from other manufacturers outside of Apple, even if it’s an extremely unlikely scenario (not to mention not entirely legal, given the licensing terms of macOS). However, you need a reasonably new processor chip that supports at least the ARMv8.2 instruction set, and some features of Rosetta are closely tied to Apple’s proprietary hardware, so performance may not be the best.
It should be noted right away that for the moment the Windows situation does not change one iota – and probably never will, unless Microsoft decides to sell licenses to install Windows 10 and Windows 11 ARM. Finally, it is easy to deduce that the novelty will be particularly useful and especially appreciated by developers.
