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I have an Electron app that apparently crashes on Linux arm64 so I need to debug this myself. I have both a MacBook and a Windows Surface that are arm64. Apparently people have messed up their Surface by trying to dual boot them. Do I use a VM? On which machine?

27/3/26, 5:18 pm0 reposts2 likes

Tim Fish

@timfish.dev

27 Mar

The Electron app communicates with USB hardware and that has always been super painful with VMs so I usually like to boot into the OS proper 🤔

Jonas Kruckenberg

@jonaskruckenberg.de

27 Mar

back when working at tauri I made ready-to-boot template VMs for exactly this. Can highly recommend UTM, but haven’t used USB on them

Jonas Kruckenberg

@jonaskruckenberg.de

27 Mar

id expect you can do virtio passthrough and that should to your guest userspace appear the same no? virtio being a different driver should really only impact kernel code

Jonas Kruckenberg

@jonaskruckenberg.de

27 Mar

i guess configuration qemu passthrough will still be a bit of work

Tim Fish

@timfish.dev

27 Mar

thanks, I'll give it a try!

James Sumners

@james.sumners.info

27 Mar

I don’t think I have ever been successful trying to get usb working under UTM

Tim Fish

@timfish.dev

27 Mar

Hopefully it crashes before USB matters and then I don't need to care 😉

Bumping into people

@bumpingintopeople.bsky.social

2 Apr

I have had better luck with USB devices with VMware. They have made their Workstation product free to download. Give it a shot before you try dual booting (it’s a pain anyway even without Surface issues) P.S: The extent of my use case was only copying data from/to a USB stick.