A developer shares their experience setting up NixOS micro VMs on macOS using the microvm.nix framework with vfkit for better performance than QEMU. The article provides a practical tutorial for configuring Nix Darwin with Linux builder support on Apple Silicon Macs. This addresses documentation gaps and setup challenges encountered on M4 MacBooks.
Background
NixOS is a Linux distribution built on the Nix package manager, known for its reproducible builds and declarative system configuration. Running Linux VMs on macOS has traditionally used QEMU, but newer virtualization frameworks offer better performance on Apple Silicon.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Apr 10, 2026 at 01:12 AM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10