The biggest problem with UTM is that it works great for some people, and works terribly for others.
Seriously, scroll up and down on the threads here on this page, and you'll see a bunch of people saying "I wish I could use UTM, but it doesn't work / is unusably slow" and a bunch of people replying "weird, it works great for me."
My experience: UTM has literally never worked for me. I just tried to do a bog standard Ubuntu ARM install on my M1 2021 Mac, following the guide here https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ and it failed. I'm staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen.
Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work.
I even paid $10 for UTM on the Mac App Store, like a sucker, hoping that I could get some tech support that way, but the only tech support channel is their Discord, which is full of randos saying "lol, works for me, skill issue."
My recommendation: Give UTM a try! Either you'll love it, and save a bunch of money, or it won't work at all, like me, and you'll just have to pay $100/year for Parallels. Parallels is probably gonna just work.
If Parallels doesn't work for you, you can reach out to them and talk to a person who can help, because they want you to keep paying to renew your Parallels license. They're incentivized to help you succeed.
> Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work.
I tried the latest debian (downloaded it off their website) and have had no issues, aside from one bizarre one. If you set your boot VM above a specific size, not even a large one, I mean like 30GB to 100GB (I forgot how much) then your VM boots really slow. And if you set it large enough, your VM will never boot. Adding a second drive of any size will not trigger this bug at all.
Seriously, scroll up and down on the threads here on this page, and you'll see a bunch of people saying "I wish I could use UTM, but it doesn't work / is unusably slow" and a bunch of people replying "weird, it works great for me."
My experience: UTM has literally never worked for me. I just tried to do a bog standard Ubuntu ARM install on my M1 2021 Mac, following the guide here https://docs.getutm.app/guides/ubuntu/ and it failed. I'm staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen.
Sadly, the people for whom it works great can't really provide any useful technical support for the people for whom it doesn't work.
I even paid $10 for UTM on the Mac App Store, like a sucker, hoping that I could get some tech support that way, but the only tech support channel is their Discord, which is full of randos saying "lol, works for me, skill issue."
My recommendation: Give UTM a try! Either you'll love it, and save a bunch of money, or it won't work at all, like me, and you'll just have to pay $100/year for Parallels. Parallels is probably gonna just work.
If Parallels doesn't work for you, you can reach out to them and talk to a person who can help, because they want you to keep paying to renew your Parallels license. They're incentivized to help you succeed.