
This virtual machine can support Ubuntu and Windows very well on the new Apple M1 chip. The best virtual machine platform I found is Parallels. UTM also works, you can refer to UTM on M1 MacBook Air for reference. The QEMU barely works, and I got the same result as this reddit post, which I do not recommend you to do that. To run the Ubuntu on the M1 MacBook Air, I tried several different virtual machines. But now, it turns out that I am very confident to work on the M1 MacBook Air! I hesitated for quite a long time since my major working platform is Ubuntu (on ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd), and I worried about the software compatibility of M1 platform a lot. To be honest, this is my first Mac laptop. Once I heard docker has support M1 chip natively, I order the MacBook Air immediately. I bought 2020 MacBook Air in early 2021 since I was waiting for the catch-up of the software adaptation to the M1 chip. Here, I would like to talk about my experience with M1 MacBook AIr. I put some links below for your reference. If you are intested in the general experience of M1 MacBook Air, there are a lot of YouTube videos you can checkout out. Overall, I am satisfied with this solution, and I have already integrate my MacBook Air into my daily work pipeline.

Both methods run blazingly fast on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air without noise and obvious heat. There are two ways you can use ROS and ubuntu on Apple M1 chip: Virtual Machines and Docker. In this post, I will introduce the setup procedure of Ubuntu and ROS on the platform based on Apple Silicon M1 chip.
