thanks. i'll give both paths a try.
fwiw, reason i am trying to stick with macOS vm (vs. Ubuntu) on my Mac is being able to mount an external USB3 drive for blockchain DBs. i have some success with this with macOS vms, but not with Ubuntu. for Ubuntu, i'll need to place the vm on the USB drive with DBs on the virtual disk (workable, not ideal).
Mac is fine as long as you have enough technical background to get the package running or building from source. OSX is a bad platform for open source when compared with Linux and Windows. It is acutely worse when it comes to software that relies on old GUI library, like in Armory's case.
What I am recommending here is how I'd do it I had to use Armory on a Mac: build DB from source and run it on host (OSX) and run the client on a guest VM of some Linux distro (ideally Debian based, that's what I dev on).