[ikatson]

> My thought was why use UTM? Most of this can be achieved with qemu alone

Afaik UTM uses Qemu under the hood, but provides a nice UI on top for the basic use cases. It also has a library of prepared images, so that your VM is a few clicks away from intention to have one.

It can also modify the VM, resize storage after creation etc.

Of course all of it can be done with QEMU alone, but this makes it easier to deal with than remembering tons of QEMU command line arguments.

[larusso]

Guess you misunderstood me. I know that UTM is built on top of qemu. I use it as well. I mean when already using this init image tooling etc why clicking through the UI to setup a VM. One would think to offload this also to a script. Because in the posts steps UTM is just a means to start the resulting image.

[ikatson]

Maybe I did misunderstand, I agree the post makes it overly complicated! You definitely don't need cloud-init just to run Linux on Mac OS

[jjtheblunt]

> Afaik UTM uses Qemu under the hood

During installation UTM asks if you’re willing to use Apple virtualization rather than qemu