Apple Wants People to Use Proprietary Software to Run "Linux"
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Ars Technica ☛ Parallels can finally run x86 versions of Windows or Linux on Apple Silicon [Ed: Proprietary and untrustworthy, VirtualBox works OK]
Virtualization software like Parallels and VMware Fusion give Mac owners the ability to run Windows and Linux on top of macOS, but for Apple Silicon Macs, that support was limited to the Arm-based versions of those operating systems. And while Windows and Linux both support some level of x86-to-Arm app translation that attempts to maintain compatibility with most software, there are still plenty of things that demand an Intel or AMD processor with the x86 instruction set.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Parallels Can Now Run x86 Windows and Linux on Apple Silicon Mac
Parallels Desktop, a popular application for running Windows and Linux virtual machines on Mac, can now run 64-bit x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs. That means more versions of Windows and Linux can run on the latest M1, M2, M3, and M4 Mac computers.
Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, and other similar virtualization tools are only designed to run operating systems built on the same architecture as the host. When Mac computers used x86 Intel processors, a Mac could virtualize the regular PC versions of Windows and Linux (and many other operating systems) with a minimal performance hit. When Apple switched to the ARM-based Apple Silicon architecture with the first M1 Mac computers, virtualization was mostly limited to Windows 11 on ARM and some ARM Linux distributions.
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AppleInsider ☛ New Parallels update trials x86 Linux & Windows VMs on Apple Silicon
For Linux users, this also gives an alternative to running Linux virtual machines through Rosetta.