Now I tried Debian as well. It boots fine, but the username & password mentioned are incorrect. There's some way to go until this thing is usable I would say.

I've found using ordinary qemu to be more convenient than those wrappers. It's faster to read man than to find what I need in those GUIs.

Be aware though, it was easy to crash M1 with default qemu settings few months ago.

Are you saying that it crashed the host OS, or just qemu?

Entire host macOS was crashed. Must be a bug with macOS. May be it is fixed by now, I don't really want to try as I don't like when my OS crashes. You can inspect qemu command line from UTM, I'm not sure if I saved my scripts, but there're some weird flags which I had no idea what they're for, but when I removed them, it was boom, reboot.

Were you trying to use more than 8GB of memory? There's an option to pass to qemu for highmem. Could be hitting this issue: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/713

I think that I hit something similar to this issue: https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/3946

I didn't set too much RAM, definitely less than 8GB.