I’ve tested two VMs: UTM and Parallels.

UTM

You can get UTM also from App Store (which I did), then you’ll get automatic updates and you’ll support the developers.

General Settings:

• Application / Prevent system from sleeping -> on
• Input: “Option Is Meta Key” -> ignore this. I thought it swaps “Cmd” and “Alt”, allowing Cmd to function as Alt and Alt/Option as Super, but I was wrong: it’s some gimmick for Emacs.
• To swap “Cmd” and “Alt”, causing the Mac keyboard having the same modifier key order as a PC keyboard “Fn, Ctrl, Super, Alt”:
  • install gnome-tweaks, then “Keyboard & Mouse”, “Additional Layout Options”, “Alt and Win behavior”, “Alt is swapped with Win”
• Input: invert scrolling

VM Settings:

• QEMU / Balloon Device -> on

Additional keyboard shortcuts I found for Parallels but work for UTM too:

• Home = Fn+ArrowLeft
• End = Fn+ArrowRight
• PgUp = Fn+ArrowUp
• PgDown = Fn+ArrowDown
• Delete = Fn+Backspace
• Insert - couldn’t find any Fn combination for this. Press I to insert in vim.

GPU drivers to use:

• virtio-gpu-gl-pci only works with Ubuntu 24.04+ which has newest mesa drivers required for GPU acceleration. Note that Java-based apps (such as Intellij IDEA) won’t work and will display black rectangle.
• virtio-gpu-pci works with any Ubuntu, the acceleration is disabled and the performance is horrible.

Network card:

• Switch to virtio-net-pci: it’s recommended by UTM.

Troubleshooting

A lot of these issues comes from the fact that I installed from ubuntu-server image then installed ubuntu-desktop package. Probably should have went with ubuntu-desktop iso instead.

Q: Ubuntu prints 9pnet_virtio: no channels available for device share

A: No idea what that is. Ubuntu eventually boots up. The messages went away, probably because I uninstalled lxd-agent-loader (below).

Q: lxd-agent.service fails to start.

A: lxd journalctl -u lxd-agent.service shows that “couldn’t mount virtiofs or 9p, failing”. No idea what that is, removed it with sudo apt autoremove --purge lxd-agent-loader which fixed this issue.

Q: Boot blocked by “Job systemd-networkd-wait-online.service/start running”

A: cloud-init configures netplan to initialize network interfaces upon boot. I’ve uninstalled cloud-init and removed /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml. That didn’t help. sudo systemctl disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service worked around the problem, but it’s better to decide to use either networkd or NetworkManager with netplan and stick to that - networkd on ubuntu-server, NetworkManager on ubuntu-desktop.

Parallels

Parallels offers to install Ubuntu 22.04 and that’s what you should do: then Parallels automatically installs the guest tools and the GUI speed is just brilliant.

In Parallels Desktop Settings:

• Shortcuts
  • macOS System Shortcuts / Send macOS system shortcuts: Always.
    • This not only enables Alt+Tab to work properly in your VM, but also enables Ctrl+Left/Right arrow to properly skip words in IDEA.
  • To stop Parallels interfering with IDEA shortcuts, go to Application Shortcuts and disable shortcuts for:
    • Preferences
    • Toggle Coherence
    • Toggle Full Screen
    • Toggle Modality
• Devices: set to ‘Connect it to my Mac’ to stop interfering with common work

Additional keyboard shortcuts I found for Parallels but work for UTM too:

• Home = Fn+ArrowLeft
• End = Fn+ArrowRight
• PgUp = Fn+ArrowUp
• PgDown = Fn+ArrowDown
• Delete = Fn+Backspace
• Insert - couldn’t find any Fn combination for this. Press I to insert in vim.

Even better: get the Magic keyboard with Numeric Keypad; don’t forget the “International English ISO” layout.

To make sure that Alt+Insert works with IDEA: go to Parallels Desktop Preferences / Shortcuts / Virtual machines, select any linux box to edit the “Linux profile” and add the following mapping:

• Cmd+Backspace -> Win+Insert (remember that we swapped Win with Alt in Gnome).

Linux VM settings

• Options
  • Sharing: disable everything except “Share custom Mac folders”. Then Manage Folders and select one specific folder to share.
• Hardware
  • CPU & Memory: Advanced and check “Adaptive Hypervisor”
  • Mouse & Keyboard: Don’t optimize for games
  • Shared printers: turn off
  • Sound & Camera: disable everything