It wasn't too long ago when I wrote about UTM that provides virtualization and emulation software for the Mac. Great news for Mac users as VMWare Fusion is now free for personal use. The arrival of Orka Desktop, a new offering from MacStadium, a name familiar to developers who rely on cloud-based macOS solutions, now offers bare-metal Macs and virtualized macOS via Orka.
MacStadium now provides the same virtualization service they offer via Orka to the desktop. Orka Desktop is a free download. Orka Desktop functions the same way as most virtualization software - you provide resources, e.g., number of CPU, amount of memory and storage, and install your preferred operating system. In Orka Desktop's case, like UTM, you can select pre-configured images from their repository (if you prefer, you can select Apple's OS image repository, too).
To test Orka Desktop, I created a new VM using one of the pre-configured images from MacStadium (see image above). Whilst most of the OS that I have virtualized or emulated are Linux-based or in some rare occasion, Windows, having macOS as a guest operating system is new to me. As expected, however, the macOS Sonoma worked out of the box.
Everything you expect from macOS runs perfectly fine. I guess I was expecting too much from this as a consumer, which might not be the particular target market for Orka Desktop. For one thing, I couldn't do copy-and-paste between the host OS to the guest OS - something that you can do on Parallels and VMWare Fusion (I admit that I did not test this on UTM and VirtualBox). I suspect that this feature will come sooner rather than later.
Unlike consumer virtualization software, Orka Desktop does not provide configuration options for audio devices and network devices. Yep, tried to play a video from within Safari and there's no sound! LOL.
MacStadium's Orka Desktop is a first desktop version of their Orka technology that powers virtualization on their cloud infrastructure. Like its cloud services, the target audience is not the majority of consumers who expect a desktop OS experience.