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by somewhatrandom9 11 days ago
Though it doesn't get by all the hurdles mentioned, it is alternatively possible to run Mac OS in a VM on your Mac using UTM and install Claude Code within the UTM VM. UTM can be run under a non-admin Mac account. This can allow you to use most Mac-native tooling, at least. The interactive performance of using the Claude Code ui on the VM isn't great, however. I'm not sure if you can log into the VM via terminal on the host from the non-root admin account to avoid the ui performance issues.
1 comments

An argument against this method is UTM doesn't support graphics acceleration so browser support will be hobbled. Even if you don't need the acceleration, I've found browsers in UTM virtualized OS's can't get past some modern captchas and other browser fingerprinting checkpoints :\. It's terrible but that's the way it is.
I don't know about solving captchas, but if you are running macOS virtual machines on an Apple Silicon Mac, hardware graphics acceleration is supposed to be natively supported out of the box when using UTM's Apple Virtualization Framework backend.

A primary source of UI lag is how Apple's native virtualization framework processes multitouch trackpad events. There are other issues like mismatched resolutions and framerates, too. Ask your favorite ai to debug. You can try e.g. deselection of the trackpad setting and instead select basic mouse support, and that can clear things up..

> browsers in UTM virtualized OS's can't get past some modern captchas and other browser fingerprinting checkpoints :\

I'm using Qubes OS, where everything runs in VMs without GPU acceleration, and never experienced this.