> Original source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...

It looks like Parallels has the same restrictions that you'd get from running Win11 ARM inside the UTM hypervisor on M1/M2 Macs (like I currently do): No WSL/WSA and no virtualization based security or sandboxes.

I've had a licensed copy of Win11 Arm running in Parallels for months. I just installed the dev version as mentioned in the AT article. At first it wouldn't let me buy a license, but at some point a few months ago it allowed me to buy a license and that has been fine ever since. Runs great. Good that the support has become official now.

Every year Apple talks about their commitment to gaming, and every year macOS gaming gets worse. It was never in great shape, but switching to Metal, dropping 32-bit support, and launching Apple Silicon killed it deader than a doornail. Then there was the whole Epic debacle, and the Xbox/game streaming apps debacle, and the (multiple) Nvidia debacles... The benefits of those choices usually outweigh the loss, but they mean there will never be significant games on Macs again.

I expect killing their relationships with every game company in the world will make their VR headset efforts rather painful.

There was actually a time in Mac gaming in the late '90s through early '00s where most blockbuster strategy games would get ported to Mac OS. And this was when there were way fewer Macs in circulation than there are today. For example Rise of Nations, Age of Mythology, Age of Empires II, Company of Heroes, etc. all had Mac native ports. Today, I'd like to play Age of Empires IV and Company of Heroes 3 but I'll probably need to get a PC for that.

Anecdata: I play a silly amount of World of Tanks on PC (DX11), running the x86 Windows release through parallels on the Mac is significantly more performant than it is to run it on MacOS via the official codeweavers wine wrapper.

This is likely due to only one layer of translation being done in MacOS, as opposed to the two of Wine.

I really hope this leads to performance enhancements with windows clients on parallels

I used a Windows 7 or 8 license left over from an old MSDN subscription to activate Windows 11 on UTM/macOS successfully.

What do you use windows arm for? The Windows-only software I use only works on x86 Windows. Obviously it’s subjective, but my god, windows is so bad.

Maybe. There are ARM builds of windows, we just need to drivers for Apple Silicon.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsins...

I'd like that. I'm a big fan of the whole design and build of the Macbook Pro, but macOS is starting to feel very dated.

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I am confused because I have been using Windows 11 through Parallels for probably 6 months. Parallels automatically downloaded the ISO for me and everything.

The rumor is that it's because Microsoft has an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm [1].

[1]: https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-exclusivity-deal-mic...

Microsoft now has to offer support for a niche use case and with host OS and virtualization app no under their control. Probably costs serious money and took a big customer interested in mass deploying the VM to commit to that.

What about a SteamDeck for the Teens? Add a dock and its a full desktop experience with support for dual monitors for around the price of a base level Mac Mini but also portable.

Yeah the hardware is fantastic but ARM->x86, Windows->Mac (or virtualization), and OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan -> Metal is just too many translation layers to give a quality or reliable experience unless you cherry pick titles. Not to mention you run into a lot of DRMs that don't work because they assume a x86 Windows kernel to interact with.

Of course if you're alternative is to remain on your current Mac then you could just as well upgrade to the new one anyways and leave the old one dedicated towards Windows based gaming.

Where is the issue? Buy them their own computer.

Have you looked at GeForce Now as an option?

My kids have started in robotics competition. SolidWorks has provided incredible licenses for free. Can’t run SolidWorks on Mac. So I had to buy them a desktop with a discrete NVIDIA GPU, upgraded the RAM, got them a low latency 32” monitor. Found my old Steam account still works…

Kids…

Have you tried Crossover? It's a fork Wine with good support for lots of windows games. Very good performance on M1 for lots of games, even in benchmarks the m1 performs is comparable to the highest end windows machines.

Some games work great through Parallels, like Left4Dead 2. Others work via CrossOver. But support is not that broad unfortunately. I hope things improve vastly once Asahi Linux can run Proton - Valve has added Linux support to so many games already (for the Steam Deck).

As someone else pointed out, check out GeForce Now. It's cloud gaming, and works crazy good. Been using it for a bit now.

wine, on macOS or on a linux dual boot on your current Mac (with Proton), maybe?

The Parallels desktop experience is shockingly well-accelerated. I played 1440p video from YouTube in a Microsoft Edge window (not in full-screen though) and didn't notice any appearance of dropped frames. Animations in Windows are smoother than they are on my 8th Gen Core i3 desktop.

As for full-blown Visual Studio, there is an ARM version now with most (but not all) workloads available. YMMV if you rely on those unavailable workloads or if you have x86/x64 DLLs in your project, but this has improved substantially I believe with Windows 11 ARM now supporting 64-bit/x64 translation (whereas Windows 10 ARM only supported 32-bit/x86 officially outside of Insider previews).

Parallels performance is really good. I haven't used VS specifically but it'll only choke if I'm trying demanding games. It's quite impressive.

Assuming you're doing .NET development, have you looked at JetBrains Rider?

I haven't spent much time with it myself but a lot of my colleagues swear by it even on Windows.

Sibling comments here don't square with my experience running VS2022 under Parallels on M1 MacBook Pro. I found it unusably slow for regular work and ended up moving back to a Dell laptop. This was a year back so perhaps things have changed, curious to know if anything has changed.

I use VS 2019 in Parallels with SSRS/SSIS and .Net Framework projects with little issues. I did have a problem with IIS Express breaking after each Windows update (fixed by uninstalled it and downloading the most recent from Msft) but that seems to have fixed. Now that Rider has an ARM build I use that for my 1 remaining .Net Framework project and it works fine.

The Mac version of Visual Studio isn't even Visual Studio. It's a glorified MonoDevelop.

There are plenty of apps or features that remain Windows exclusive. In Microsoft's office suite, things like PowerBI only offer Windows desktop apps. And even within apps like Powerpoint there are features that don't exist in the Mac version (like grids). There are certainly equivalent or better alternatives to both of these examples available on Mac, but if your company uses these products Parallels could be a better alternative to having a second PC.

I haven't really loved Mac OS in a while, so I could see you could want the very nice Mac hardware but a different operating system. I never really did Windows-on-Mac much, besides some very occasional Boot Camp usage, but I did run Linux on a couple different Mac laptops for several years.

I don't think it really makes much sense now though... no particularly good reason not to just get a Dell XPS or something in that ballpark for your Linux or Windows needs and avoid the hassle.

The sheer absurdity of running Linux tools on WSL inside Parallels inside a Mac host might be worth something, too. (Or actually, can you even do that, with two levels of virtualization? I seem to remember this is an issue, maybe specifically on the new ARM chips.)

My dentist has some proprietary software to administer her practice (I don't think it does everything - maybe keeps X ray images, and some other stuff.) It's Windows only and she runs it in a Windows XP virtual machine of some kind. But all the computers in the office are Macs. She upgraded to the M1 iMacs but the old Windows software doesn't work in there. So she kept an old Intel Mac in a corner somewhere to run the software.

If she could run that in Arm Windows in a window on a Mac I'm sure she would.

I have moved all my development to my Mac (C#, Sql Server) except I need Visual Studio for .Net Framework, SSIS and SSRS projects. Visual Studio for Windows ARM recently came out but doesn't work with most extensions, so I still use VS 2019.

Testing cross platform developed apps would be an other reason

some software is windows only, especially most games (if not by number, then by feeling if you're in the pc gaming world).

It’s not for you, it’s a way for Microsoft employees and Windows fanboys finally being officially able to buy good hardware and run Windows on it. I can’t imagine how awful it must be for all those Windows bros to see everyone else work on amazing M2 hardware whilst they are trodding behind on the shit show that the entire Surface brand is.

Parallels now automatically downloads Windows 11 and sets it up for you (including skipping Microsoft account), just tried today. However, it is not an activated Windows install, and it will take you to the Store asking you to purchase a Windows 11 Pro license for $199, but you can use it unactivated with the typical non-activated Windows restrictions. According to internet commentators, Windows 11 Pro x86/x64 retail keys are now acceptable whereas they previously were not, so if you have any of those lying around (or a Windows 10, or 8.1, or 7 Pro key as they are often grandfathered-in), they'll do the trick.

Which, if you are buying Windows for this purpose, I'd strongly recommend just buying a retail package. If you buy in the Microsoft Store, it will be tied to your Microsoft Account which isn't really desirable, as retail keys are transferrable between computers [1] whereas OEM keys and MSA-purchased keys aren't.

[1] Many people don't know this - don't buy the OEM version of Windows for $20 cheaper. It will be tied to your unique hardware - but retail keys won't. Upgrade your workstation three years from now? If you have a retail key, you can wipe Windows from your old PC and activate on the new one, completely within the license, with no need to purchase again.

You can run with more memory in parallels’ pro SKU. Albeit at increased cost.

Media Access Control?

I believe the Verge and others are hopeful for a resurrection of the bootcamp application to support natively running ARM Windows on ARM Mac hardware. Much in the same way as they did when they sold Intel Mac hardware

To really remember, let's assume a person needed to be 15 around 2005. Those people are now 33. Not what I'd call "very young".

Microsoft was founded 40+ years ago. It's changed over that time. So has Apple.

So has the entire IT market.

Microsoft probably doesn't care about Windows market share on actual native hardware.

They are moving their business customers onto the cloud. Microsoft Windows 365 is what they want people on. Monthly subscriptions and streamed remote desktop.

They want people using their apps, Office 365 is already available on MacOS.

It's an ARM CPU, why would it run x86-64 natively through Bootcamp?

There's no Bootcamp on M1/M2 hardware as of yet. But the Asahi folks have a standard UEFI implementation, so it would be possible to run ARM64 Windows if drivers for the Apple silicon were available.

You're worried about performance but want x86 emulation on ARM?

x86 software runs fine on Windows for ARM nowadays. I've been using it on Parallels for the last year and it has been working great (I don't do any high performance stuff on Windows though).

The biggest compatibility hurdle was the lack of DirectX 12 support in Parallels. Otherwise the performance and compatibility of ARM based Windows was fantastic, I used my MacBook almost exclusively in the Windows Parallels VM for about 6 months. Microsoft has had their own ARM based devices for a long time so they've built up a great x86 translation layer.

Just in case you or someone else didn’t know; “Bootcamp” is a tool that allows anyone to set up dual-boot on their Mac without having to touch the bootloader or hunt for drivers. It’s not an emulation or virtualization solution, which is why it wouldn’t work with x86 Windows.