It’s also fun because it backs the familiar Raspbian interface with your PC or Mac’s hardware, which is much more powerful than the little Pi. That makes it useful for testing out projects when your Pi isn’t handy. This Raspbian-like OS (as the names imply, both operating systems are based on Debian) allows you to use your PC or Mac as a kind of substitute for your Raspberry Pi. This time, we’re changing things up: we’re going to show you how to use a PC or Mac to run the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s desktop operating system, Debian with Raspberry Pi Desktop (for brevity’s sake, we’ll call it just “Raspberry Pi Desktop” from now on). If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject.Our articles usually show you how to do things on a Raspberry Pi. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.

As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website.

It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

Windows vm on mac