Canonical's Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well.

New to Multipass 1.17 is " direct support for Linux distributions other than Ubuntu ." Initially focused on for Multipass 1.17 is built-in support for both Debian and Ubuntu Linux. They are opening up other Linux distributions for easier deployment with Multipass and are welcoming user feedback about other Linux distributions worth adding.

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Multipass 1.17 also allows better simulating cloud environments locally via a new availability zones feature. The availability zones for Multipass allow for organizing VMs into pre-defined zones with isolated subnets and other cloud-like environment features.

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Multipass 1.17 also brings a redesigned image catalog in the Multipass GUI, a new Host Compute System (HCS) driver on Microsoft Windows as more robust than their prior Hyper-V integration path, and a new Apple virtualization framework back-end for macOS. The Apple Virtualization Framework provides faster startup and native ASIF disk image support on macOS 26.

Also new to Multipass 1.17 is POWER PPC64EL and IBM s390x / IBM Z architecture support. The Multipass GUI is also now defaulting to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS along with bringing various bug fixes and other enhancements.

Downloads and more details on Multipass 1.17 via [3]GitHub and [4]Ubuntu Discourse .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=multipass_117_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2026&image=multipass_117_2_lrg

[3] https://github.com/canonical/multipass/releases/tag/v1.17.0

[4] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/multipass-1-17-0-released-local-cloud-simulation-more-linux-distributions-and-new-platform-drivers/89871