Parallels Desktop Pro now sends spam notifications with ads to your desktop | Hacker News Reader

Parallels Desktop Pro now sends spam notifications with ads to your desktop

old.reddit.com

166 pointszathan54 comments

Teamviewer did this with pop-ups, I made my employer cancel 20+ licenses by explaining the situation, we switched to competitors. Many customers followed, I don't remember how many but a lot.

Spotify started promoting podcasts and annoyed me with pop-ups for inviting friends, cancelled my family subscription, made my parents cancel theirs too.

I'm voting with my wallet, and the trust other people placed with me, and I suggest others do the same.

Spotify is annoying me with podcasts too

which services did you move to?

Pocket Casts is my personal preferred podcast player. Note, Spotify has been fracturing the echo system with exclusive shows, so some things may only be available on Spotify. This is not a personal concern for me.

I like Pocket Casts too (although I'm on the old version that was paid because I didn't want to learn a completely new UI when the old one was just fine), but I assume GP was asking about what music service to replace Spotify.

I've been mostly happy with youtube-music (formerly google play music). It's not as good as spotify as pushing new music at me that I really like, but as a bonus you get an ad-free youtube as well (or at least used to. I might be grandfathered in).

However, I'm fed up with censorship and I'm very seriously considering self-hosting with Jellyfin (which I already have for movies and shows) or something else. Would love to hear from others what they use to self-host music collection.

i tried Apple Music and really liked the Library, especially that i can shuffle by genre

but the apps are buggy, poorly designed and slow on my Apple devices which are 5+ years old, so take that into the account

also i tried Tidal, but found the catalogue lacking (no Metallica, no Rammstein)

i’m therefor sticking to Spotify, but getting very annoyed each time i open the app and presented with podcasts which i never in my entire life intend to listen and also have to feel bad for the underpaid musicians

grass is always greener on the other side i guess

Ouch, I've considered Tidal too but no Metallica is rough. No Rammstein though, are they on spotify? they're not on youtube music and I thought I read somewhere that they don't do streaming. Would love to listen to some rammstein.

I’ve just checked whether Rammstein are on Spotify and they are there.

I see Metallica but no Rammstein on Tidal. The biggest deal breaker for me is the lack of Siri integration. I really want to switch from Spotify, but I don’t think Tidal is quite ready yet.

For what it's worth, https://spicetify.app/ via https://github.com/spicetify/spicetify-marketplace provides plugins that can hide podcast promotions (and do many other incredible things). All disclaimers about untrusted code and code injection apply!

For me, no ads, no upsell spam and no unwanted feature pushed down my throat are more important than anything else, therefore I've went back to actually buying individual albums. They sound better like that anyway (yes I know they don't but I'm just an unreasonable ape after all).

For people who are there for the recommendations, perhaps finding a community with similar taste could help. As in, interact with humans instead of algorithms. Yes it's more time consuming and way less efficient in general, but perhaps what you find could sound better for you too?

Cancelled my auto-renew set for May. It was the only option for Windows on M1 for a while but now it's not that much better than the others and they feel the need to spam my inbox and notifications with ads which made me realize I don't really need it anymore, especially if I get more ads than advantages for the high price.

The hints of their desire to go this direction have been present for a few major versions now: advertisements creeping into installers, auto-updates to a new major version that requires a paid upgrade, making non-subscription renewals more expensive and difficult, etc.

Parallels never innovated anything; they got purchase as a cheaper, leaner, more consumer friendly alternative to VMware Fusion and maintained that as long as they could. Today the only value enhancement they really offer is a toolbar multi-tool (like a youtube downloader, etc.)

Open source and/or free solutions had already gotten to parity with their core offering, and the ARM transition cemented their end. Their only real strategy at this point is to keep extracting money from their remaining customers who don't realize the product died on the vine a couple years ago.

You could have been great, Parallels. Sorry to see it end this way.

>"Open source and/or free solutions had already gotten to parity with their core offering, and the ARM transition cemented their end. Their only real strategy at this point is to keep extracting money from their remaining customers who don't realize the product died on the vine a couple years ago."

My experience is the opposite. I purchased a Mac for the first time due to the M1 chips, and there is no other option I could find to emulate Windows on these chips except for Parallels (Boot Camp currently doesn't work on M1 chips, and VMWare Fusion only has a preview version for the chips currently available).

> Parallels never innovated anything;

I don't have any love for Parallels, but I don't think this is true/fair. I bought Parallels in the late 00s because they had a "seamless" mode where Windows apps would sit in the tray at the bottom and seamlessly run as though they were native even though they were on the VM. At the time nobody else had that, so it was a killer feature. It felt like straight up magic at the time.

> Parallels never innovated anything... and the ARM transition cemented their end.

I switched to Parallels for the first time precisely because they were the first to support GPU accelerated Windows ARM64 VMs while Fusion sat back for a year and on release still doesn't support GPU acceleration.

That said I'm now extremely turned off with how hard they've been pushing this app deal. I have 3 emails about it from the last week as well as the notification on my Mac.

Every app gets to send me exactly one spam notification, after which I either silence notifications from that specific app or uninstall the application. This behavior is so common and so fixable, I don't see why this is news worthy.

This one is paid, so most people would nurture the naive expectation to not receive spam/ads.

I stopped using it maybe 2 years ago or so - just because how aggressive their shit ads were.

I stopped using it because my free work license expired, and I found out that VMWare Fusion was free for personal use, and it doesn't appear to bombard you with ads.

multipass is very good for ssh linux.

I, too; abandoned Parallels for VMware, after I found Parallels to be increasingly unstable and bloated.

How do you obtain Fusion free for personal use? Every link I find shows a price.

https://customerconnect.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=f...

I learned that's not the case the hard way from the Ultimate Guitar app. Upsells at every corner, and a giant full-screen ad you have to reach up to the top of the screen and X out every time you open the app

Appreciate the heads up! I've eyed that app before but no thanks.

This hasn't been the case for many years. I paid for a Windows 10 home license in 2017 ($119) and received ads inside the product. I pay for Dash Pass ($9.99/mo) and they attempt to send push notification ads.

What ads were you seeing in W10 Home and where did they appear?

Pre-installed 3rd party apps in start (from Microsoft directly, not just OEMs), "suggested" 3rd party apps in start, One Drive/O365 ads in File Explorer's ribbon, the built in games like Solitaire include ads, Ink Workspace advertises apps, share functionality advertises apps, "Get Office" notifications, product ads in the lock screen.

I think they appeared in the start menu. I only briefly used windows 10.

For some reason I've never seen ads in W10 either (Norton blocked them? Switzerland specific?). No idea why some feel attacked when mentioning it...

Excellent reason to move to UTM: mac.getutm.app

Open source, actively updated, and the latest version is very easy to use.

Runs on QEMU if I'm not mistaken, which very powerful but not an easy beast to tame. I haven't worked with UTM (yet), but I can definitely see the added value!

It also uses Hypervisor Framework for much faster speeds on the Mac:

> UTM employs Apple's Hypervisor virtualization framework to run ARM64 operating systems on Apple Silicon at near native speeds. On Intel Macs, x86/x64 operating system can be virtualized. In addition, lower performance emulation is available to run x86/x64 on Apple Silicon as well as ARM64 on Intel. For developers and enthusiasts, there are dozens of other emulated processors as well including: ARM32, MIPS, PPC, and RISC-V.

Everything has to use Apple's Hypervisor virtualization framework on Apple Silicon, there is basically no third party code execution at hypervisor or kernel level.

I have never heard of this one! I couldn’t imagine you could use QEMU on macOS, so I won’t even try to search an alternative. Thank you stranger!

Thank you! Never heard of this!

UTM is good and I’m not the biggest Parallels fan, but Parallels is currently the only host with guest tools for Windows 11 ARM. While Windows 11 ARM can run in UTM and VMware, it’s a night/day difference in quality when using Parallels. I have to give credit where credit is due—I get 120 Hz, retina graphics in my Windows 11 ARM VM under Parallels on my M1 Pro.

That being said, I’m eagerly waiting for a viable alternative so I can ditch Parallels.

What are “guest tools”?

The things that make the host directories appear as network drives on the client, or even sync downloads/documents folders, allow drag and drop into the virtual machine, make it so the mouse just magically disconnects when you hit the edge, etc.

bombcar’s reply is correct. Too late to edit my comment now, but the main thing I was praising is actually the Parallels graphics driver.

Not true any more - UTM has guest tools, shared folders etc for windows 11.

The previous version of UTM was no good for Windows 11 at least, but the current version installs 11 fine with no need for registry hacks, and everything pretty much works as expected.

For the primary sale case of Windows QEMU based solutions still lack a paravirtual GPU option which makes performance/battery usage horrendous, particularly on higher resolution models. I do love UTM for Linux installs though and the x86 emulation lets me keep an NT 4.0 install with working IPv6 for jest

If I am paying for software, I do everything I can to avoid ads / spam notifications.

The Windows decrapify community was a lifesaver here when candy crush and other bloatware would come on windows volume license deployments

Plenty others are even worse. If I can switch to an alternative I do immediately. This is often a "tell" -> these companies sometimes then sell themselves to even scammier folks.

>The Windows decrapify community

Have a trustworthy link? I'd love to get rid of the bloat and telemetry with a simple script.

Not sure it's the one I'm using but see this:

https://github.com/n1snt/Windows-Decrapifier

for ane example. Tweak to suit. I leave auto-restart on update on, I leave remote desktop on, remove videos and some of the other folder icons.

If I'm paying for something, then I better not see ads. I write them and then uninstall unless I absolutely have zero options otherwise (say I have a contract, and it literally is the only way). I think it's a dark pattern and I definitely do not want to do business with that company, and I'll warn other people away as well. It smells of rottenness at the core of the company, and that they will do anything in the short term to make a buck.

The first time I remember adware was a winamp reverb plugin (Realreverb convolution) in the 90's. From then on it became increasingly more common. Fortunately it was also around that time I migrated most (all?) my tasks and needs to FLOSS. I fell very sorry for the people who just can't do the same.

Since it was so long ago, I even forget how problematic this is nowadays. The next barrier are ads in websites, which if the content is good, I really only care about the most intrusive ones. Nevertheless, I've been using ad-blockers for such a long time that when I see people browsing with ads it looks like another world to me.

The first time I remember adware was a winamp reverb plugin (Realreverb convolution) in the 90's.

The earliest one I can remember was RealPlayer. I'm glad that program finall... buffering...

The last realplayer version I used was G2. I remember it had "sponsors" and channels that probably payed to be on that list. That doesn't even looks like advertising to me. At the time, I really liked the fact that it allowed me to watch live video, including NASA TV, on a dial up connection.

Don't miss those times though. I like the fact that I can watch NASA TV on my FLOSS browser or using VLC.

I dropped them when they changed their licensing model and I realized I could use Docker to replace it for my purposes.

You'd think they'd wanna make their product more palatable when VirtualBox is such a great alternative.

But instead, they elect to make it worse.

Ads for a paid product. How stupid is that?

This is (sadly) nothing new. A similar notification ("Mega Mac App Bundle") popped up three years ago (2019-02-25). I wrote an angry support ticket. Apparently to no avail.

And what about the popup when the trial ends to get parallels and x other famous mac apps (not clear which ones) for a once in a lifetime deal? No thanks.

The app bundle is first-party and includes Parallels as well as other native mac app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com