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Comment by bakery2k | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone using VirtualBox on the desktop? Specifically, to run Linux/macOS/Windows guests on a macOS host?

Would you recommend it? Or is the best option VMware Fusion, Parallels, or something else?

I recently got a Mac and wanted to avoid the cost of Parallels, so I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow. Like, I would be typing text into a VM and I would type a line, then wait and watch the characters appear. This happened on a 2018 Macbook Pro host with 32GB RAM. This happened on both Windows and Ubuntu guests.

So, I tried Parallels and it was so fast I can't really tell the difference between the host and guest in terms of speed. I highly recommend Parallels.

I tried VirtualBox first. It was insanely slow

Colleague of mine has Windows running on VMWare on OSX and it's not much better. Also, but this might be because of the keyboard/OS/VMWare settings he uses, but when my muscle memory gets to work and starts using basic key combinations it feels like half of the time they are intercepted by OSX and do funny things, opening apps I don't want or switching desktops or whatever etc. No joy. All in all, of all non-commandline development experiences I ever encountered it's probably the worst. Parallels on the other hand was indeed more 'just works, get shit done'.

Is there anything as fast as Parallels on Windows? I've just switched back to Windows (dislike the new MBP keyboards yada yada), and Hyper-V on my 2018 X1 feels ridiculously slow compared to Parallels even on my Mid-2012 Mac.

Parallels is great. I like it so much that I bought the subscription, and I don't even use my Windows VM all that much.

However, sadly, third-party software that spins up VMs tends to avoid supporting Parallels. I recall Vagrant having a sub-par Parallels provider (compared to the paid VMware Fusion support), and even minikube went with VMware Fusion instead. https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/issues/220

I use VB on several different macs of various vintages and it runs Ubuntu and Win10 guests just fine. Be sure to install the Guest Additions in the guest OS, they provide a bunch of vital drivers - like video, which sounds like what might have been bogging you down.

How much RAM did you allocate to the guest? From my experience the defaults are inadequate for desktop virtualisation. You need to allocate ~4GB of RAM and a couple of cores to get a smooth desktop.

I’ve had Fedora and Ubuntu guests running on a 2015 Mac Mini with no issues.

I had to run VB on Mac host, with linux guest. No issues, but every time I need to create a VM, I set different settings than the default ones (more ram, 2 cpu cores instead of one, 3d acceleration + more video memory).

Same experience here with a MBP 15'' 2015 with 16gb of ram

I routinely run my "home" Linux desktop on a macOS host.

Pretty nice for me: I got a full-res retina screen (needs a command from host on a VM restart), changed the dpi to taste, and now have compact and crisp UI under Xfce.

I use the open-source guest additions installed by my distro's package manager (void linux), and not the Oracle-provided extensions. They work fine for time sync, clipboard sharing, file sharing, and for hi-res screen (I run 1:1 pixels, no scaling, obviously).

Saving machine state and then restoring it in 10-15 seconds is pretty nice, comparable to normal laptop hibernation mode.

What does not work well is OpenGL acceleration. That is, it sort of works, but sometimes produces visual problems that only a reboot of the VM can fix. So I run with GL acceleration disabled, and thus many nice compositor effects turned off for performance.

I use VirtualBox in combination with gitlab-runner[0] to run macOS guests for ArchMac[1] CI package building, which works great. I also use it with docker-machine instead of Docker for Mac, for performance reasons.

For actually using a virtualised desktop I favour VMware Fusion which I found is the best between features, performance, and reliability (Comparison also includes Parallels which I'm not a fan of)

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/blob/master/docs...

[1]: https://archmac.org

I haven't used Parallels in a few years due to the cost and that it stops working every time you upgrade MacOS, but it was always significantly faster for me than virtualbox.

I've used Parallels before and found it amazing - fast, simple and easy.

It's not worth the cost unless you use it very frequently though.

Parallel Desktop Lite is free for all guests except Windows.

I use it run a Windows VM on my Linux desktop - works pretty well for years.

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