// the take
VirtualBuddy is a native macOS GUI for running macOS and ARM Linux VMs on Apple Silicon, built on Apple's Virtualization framework. It's aimed at developers and testers who need to run multiple macOS versions (including betas) side by side without a second physical Mac.
Built directly on Apple's Virtualization.framework rather than a third-party hypervisor, so it gets hardware-accelerated graphics and native performance for free. APFS cloning for VM duplication is a smart use of the host filesystem - copying a multi-GB VM costs almost no extra disk space, which makes throwaway test environments cheap. The installation wizard abstracts away IPSW handling (Apple's own restore image format, local file, or URL), which is normally a manual, fiddly process. The guest app adds clipboard sharing and virtiofs-based folder mounting, showing real attention to actual dev workflow friction, not just boot-and-forget VM support.
Hard platform lock-in: Apple Silicon host and macOS 13+ only, with no Intel Mac or non-Apple host support, so the addressable use case is narrow by design. Running newer macOS betas on an older host depends on manually downloading Apple's device support files from the developer portal - a step that breaks whenever Apple reshuffles URLs or file naming, as the README's own Golden Gate caveat shows. Building from source requires your own paid Apple Developer signing team for two separate targets (main app and guest app), which is friction beyond a typical `git clone && build`. Guest-side feature support is uneven across host/guest macOS version combinations (e.g., clipboard sharing needs macOS 14+ in the guest, no guest app support at all below macOS 13), so the experience varies noticeably depending on exactly which OS pairing you're testing.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →