It does appear that Canonical has upgrade the HWE kernel for 22.04 to a 6.2 version. Until the last update, the HWE kernel was a 5.19 version. The 6.2 kernel in general works better on arm64 architectures due to improvements made in 6.0 and later. And by using a 6.2 kernel, they have included many fixes that they (in many cases poorly) back ported to 5.19.
I strongly disagree that Ubuntu is the "best all around supported distro on Apple Silicon devices". in the approximately 2 years since I've been working with Linux under Fusion on Apple Silicon, it is the worst mainstream distribution that I've worked with on Apple Silicon. It by far has given me the most problems. Many of these problem have caused Ubuntu to be unusable. You can find others on this board will echo this opinion.
IMO they do not take arm64 seriously - their time is spent on x64 and any work on arm64 appears to be an after-thought. Canonical does not provide an out-of-the-box arm64 version of Ubuntu Desktop. Their 23.04 and 23.10 daily desktop builds for arm64 (and other) archiectrures are broken (nothing to do with Fusion) and have been for over 2 months now (they know about it but have not said when they're going to fix it). They've improperly back-ported kernel "fixes" to their 5.19 kernels in 22.10 that have broken working virtual machines (taking over 4 months to deliver a fix).
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Fedora have been much more stable and reliable distros for arm64 than Ubuntu from my experience. Even Debian bookworm and RHEL 9 have been better than Ubuntu. Admittedly Ubuntu is getting better, but they've got to prove over the next couple of releases that they've cleaned up their act and deserve my recommendation.
- Paul (Technogeezer)
Editor of the Unofficial Fusion Companion Guides
