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Comment by jasoneckert | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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!

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

Thank you! Never heard of this!

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