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Eight.ly OS on your Mac

Eight.ly OS is a Linux appliance — there's no native macOS build, and none is planned. If you want to run it on a Mac, the way to do it is a virtual machine: macOS keeps running everything it's good at, and Eight.ly OS gets a Linux home alongside it, in a VM you can start, stop, or throw away.

This page is the overview — what a VM can and can't show you, and why it's the right call even for an Apple Silicon Mac with real storage attached. For the actual click-by-click setup, go to Try Eight.ly OS in a VM on your Mac.

Why a VM, not wiping macOS

Homelabbers ask, and it's a fair question — a dedicated appliance sounds cleaner than running inside a VM. Here's the honest picture for Apple Silicon:

  • Thunderbolt doesn't work under native Linux on Apple Silicon. No Thunderbolt storage, no docks, no external GPUs. The ports that make a Mac worth using as a server go dark.
  • M3 and M4 Macs can't run native Linux at all. No Linux distribution supports them.
  • Even where native Linux installs (M1/M2), you keep a macOS partition anyway. The boot process requires it — so you never actually get the whole disk back.

Put together: wiping macOS to install Eight.ly OS directly costs you Thunderbolt support, doesn't work at all on newer Macs, and doesn't even free the machine of macOS. A VM keeps everything working on the Mac side and takes minutes to set up.

If what you actually want is a dedicated appliance that owns the whole machine — with real drive bays, SMART data, and a GPU it can see directly — that's what Eight.ly OS on an x86-64 box is for. A dedicated x86-64 machine, not a Mac, is the way to get that.

What a VM on your Mac is good for

  • Evaluating the product. Click through the real installer, walk the real setup wizard, build a real storage pool from virtual disks, and deploy real apps — all before you commit any hardware.
  • Learning the interface without touching a second machine.
  • Development and testing, if you're building against the API or the App Store catalog.

What it can't show you

A VM shows you the software honestly, but it isn't hardware:

  • No real drive bays. The storage pool you build is real (it's really SnapRAID/MergerFS or ZFS on virtual disks), but there's no SMART data, no hot-swap backplane, and no cabling to learn.
  • No GPU passthrough on the free path. Nova runs CPU-only in a VM built with the free tools in the walkthrough below — slower than on a box with a GPU. Hardware transcoding in media apps is likewise unavailable there.
  • arm64 hardware coverage. The Apple Silicon build of Eight.ly OS is validated in virtual machines; check Hardware compatibility and the download page for where real-hardware testing currently stands before you rely on it outside a VM.

Get started

→ Try Eight.ly OS in a VM on your Mac — the full setup walkthrough, free, using UTM

See also