Can't decide which OS to run today? Why not Linux inside Windows inside macOS?
- Reference: 1597228811
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/12/parallels_desktop_16/
- Source link:
The company offers Parallels desktop as a better way to run Windows on Apple hardware, mostly because it lets users do so without having to reboot when they fancy running an alternate OS.
The new version 16 takes matters even further by allowing nested virtualization so that users can access Microsoft's Hyper-V desktop hypervisor inside Windows and any VMs running there. So welcome to Linux on Windows on MacOS.
Why stop there, seeing as Xen or KVM are present in plenty of Linux distros? You can even automate this stuff thanks to new plugins for Vagrant, Docker, and Jenkins. Another new plugin connects to Microsoft Visual Studio to ease application testing across OSes.
VMs can now be quite hefty – support is offered for up to 32 vCPUs and 128GB vRAM – but won't crush a host's resources thanks to the addition of Linked Clones that spawn new VMs from an existing image. VMs will also cough up disk space once shut down because VMs don't need all of the capacity provisioned to their .VMDK when not running.
Parallels is also touting better guest performance when employing DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3, kinder use of MacBook batteries and support for multi-touch gestures for Windows apps.
Admins may enjoy new tools to package VMs with their preferred applications so they can be offered in an enterprise appliance store of sorts, and the chance to push Parallels updates to users' desktops.
Parallels is also promising that this will happen just fine on the forthcoming Big Sur release of macOS.
Of course, the next version of macOS that really matters is the one that will run on Apple's new Arm-based Macs. Apple has said that its own tool to run Windows on macOS – Boot Camp – won't make the move to Arm. Parallels and the other desktop hypervisor vendors – VMware and Oracle – clearly have some work ahead of them to keep a foot in both camps. ®
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Why not go one step further?
You could even run Wine on Linux on Windows on Mac. That would allow "legacy" windows applications to be run by everyone.
I have a Mac laptop. It did have VMware fusion on it. Thanks to work, I had a fully licensed copy of all the VMware software, so I downloaded vsphere. Installed it on a VM within fusion, then spun up a VM within vsphere , and installed Windows 10 on it. As the laptop only had an i5 with 8 gig of ram, I couldn’t go too far into my virtual machine version of inception, as I ran out of ram, and even without the ram problem, the laptop was struggling a bit.
Still, it achieved the aim. I got knowledge of administering virtual machines on a vsphere system, without me having to ask for access to one of the vsphere clusters we have at work, which would have probably been refused.
Could you then enable HyperV in the Windows OS to run something really esoteric?
Surely the top reason of "Why not" will soon be that they won't be x86 and thus won't support virtualisation, only emulation (which is an entirely different beast).
ARM has virtualisation extensions available and Windows 10 runs on ARM.
Why stop there?
Grab a copy of Vice and run C64 games on Linux (on Windows (on Mac OS)).