Monday, March 20, 2017

Parallels Desktop Lite

Rich Trouton notes that Parallels Desktop Lite is now available in the Mac App Store. This is possible because it uses the Hypervisor framework instead of kernel extensions. So it runs in the sandbox, and you get these weird little alerts—which don’t look official, but I guess they must be—that it wants access to various parts of your system, such as “EFI”.

It’s free to run Mac and Linux VMs, and there’s a $60 In-App Purchase to run Windows.

None of the limitations compared with the Standard Edition seem to affect me. It was easy to install both macOS 10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11 by dragging and dropping the installer app—no need to create a bootable installer volume. After installing the Parallels Tools, I could copy and paste back and forth with the host OS.

It feels a bit slower than VMware to me.

Previously: VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop 9 and Parallels Access, Turning Off Ads in Parallels.

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Seems like the $60 IAP is per-year subscription, not a one-time purchase.

For what it's worth I wrote a guide over at Mac Kung Fu, although the steps are really pretty elementary:

http://www.mackungfu.org/HowtocreateamacOSvirtualmachineeasilyandforfree

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