What's ready, what's experimental

This is MSL-2.0.0 — still held together with love. Here's where things stand, so nothing catches you out.

Solid#

• Installing distros and creating instances.
• Shells — in the app, in Terminal.app, over SSH, and with the msl command.
• Suspend, hibernate, shut down, snapshots, and protecting instances when your Mac sleeps or shuts down.
• CPU count, manual memory, disk sizing and automatic disk growth.
• Your home folder inside Linux at /mnt/mac, and MSL Files.
• The Sandbox gates and the MSL side of the Traffic Monitor.
• Checking and repairing a disk from the Mac, with automatic backups (needs one free tool — see Checking a disk).

Experimental#

• Linux GUI apps as Mac windows. Many apps work well; some draw imperfectly. It's the most ambitious part of MSL and the most likely to surprise you.
• Everything in Experimental Features (Window ▸ Experimental Features). Every experiment lives there, and each says whether it starts on or off: - Open links on the Mac (on) — web and email links from Linux apps open in your Mac's browser and mail app, with attachments. - Show folders in MSL Files (on) — "Open containing folder" and friends open MSL Files instead of a Linux file manager. Nautilus, Dolphin and the rest still run when you start them yourself. - Linux app menus in the menu bar (off) — a Linux app's menus move into the Mac menu bar. Qt and KDE apps support it on their own; GTK apps need appmenu-gtk3-module in the instance. - Mac shortcuts, text navigation, screenshot keys and Option keys (off) — how Linux apps receive your keyboard.

Experiments aren't promises: a future version may build one in properly, change it, or remove it, depending on what the community prefers. The list is specific to each version.