I’m an M1 Macbook Air user and I’m currently unable to purchase a secondary laptop. However because I’m interested in journalism and activism, I’m looking for an alternative to Whonix on the M1 platform. I’m thinking of using UTM as my hypervisor for an ARM based Linux distribution such as Ubuntu and configuring Linux to be more like Whonix. However I’m not sure what tools would be helpful for doing this.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
May I ask why you need an “alternative to Whonix” for M1 macs? I am successfully using Whonix on my M1 mac with UTM. Are there specific issues you are experiencing? If it is building it that puts you off, there are people on the forum who may be willing to offer you a complete image. I have an image built a few months ago myself if you are interested.
Of course, accepting a pre-built image requires you to trust the person that built it, depending on your level of secrecy needed.
What is the current recommendation for M1 Mac users?
Officially there is none.
Whonix on Mac M1 (ARM) - User Support (still unsupported at time of writing) is all that ever happened and should that change that forum thread will certainly be updated.
That is actually off-topic in this forum since unspecific to Whonix and best discussed in general Linux or even general computer support places. → Potential Solutions Beyond Whonix!
Oh I didn’t realize Whonix was working on UTM. Maybe I misunderstood the documentation but from what I understood, Whonix is only experimental on Mac. I might’ve missed it but is there a guide for setting up Whonix using UTM?
Well, like I said you have to build it. To build it you need an arm64-based Debian bullseye VM. There is not a specific guide for macOS, but I was able to follow the general instructions for building Whonix found here Whonix ™ VM Build Documentation.
I would read through once to make sure you get the gist of the process. If you run into any specific problems following these instructions, I may be able to provide some help.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention that you need to use utm as the target. I know it is not listed there, but it is an option.
Hello, just for my understanding, did you use this build guide (www. whonix. o r g /wiki/MacOS#Whonix_on_Apple_Silicon)? Which VM software did you use to run debian and do you install UTM in the debian VM?
Thank you!