PARALLELS M1 LINUX PRO
PARALLELS M1 LINUX SOFTWARE

While I would love to use some other Linux offerings the easy configuration makes me not need to jump to try that. 3D has worked out of the box with their preconfigured operating systems. Parallels however has had none of those problems. VMWare was always better on that front but also still not without its warts. My years of using VirtualBox have conditioned me to just accept that 3D Acceleration is going to be wonky, especially with Linux guests. This is where Parallels is really shining. Once the machines are running the necessary “guest additions” are automatically installed which allow pass through of the clipboard, shared drives, etc. Supposedly there is a way to run macOS in virtualization too but the buttons for doing that mentioned in the documentation just aren’t there. The whole process is mostly a one button operation. The machine setup assistant comes out of the box ready to load the latest Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or Kali Linux machine or Windows 11. The configuration of virtual machines is usually where things get more dicey but even that is pretty streamlined. Installation is as easy as VirtualBox, my usual go to system on x86/圆4 systems, or VMWare. There are some really good aspects to my Parallels experience so far. For this experiment I therefore decided to try my hand at using Parallels intensely on my holiday travel trip to see if I can make a go of it. While there are some other options which I dabbled with over the years they didn’t provide enough “just works” for me out of the box. I tried virtualization at that time and the situation was not good.

I got this M1 MBP when it was first released. It was therefore time to decide whether I needed to ditch the Mac for a new Linux laptop or see if I could make a go of it with virtualization technology.

PARALLELS M1 LINUX PRO

Galago Pro from 2016) or woefully under powered for development tasks (my PineBook ‘Pro’ My Linux laptops are either long in the tooth (my trustworthy System 76 I have a “nice” Gen1 M1 MacBook Pro laptop but for it to fill that role it needs to be able to at least run it in virtualization. I prefer to do most of my work on Linux thus my I need a solid Linux environment on the road.

PARALLELS M1 LINUX SOFTWARE

As I’m starting to travel more while simultaneously seeing a ramping up in software development work I’ve had to consider my laptop situation.

Parallels m1 linux