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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

For some clarity, see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/microsoft-officially...

> These licensing problems haven't technically stopped people from running the Arm version of Windows on other hardware, including Apple Silicon Macs

> Microsoft is formally blessing Parallels as a way to run the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs

Original source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...

> Parallels® Desktop version 18 is an authorized solution

In other words, you could (unofficially) do this before, but now it's allowed according to the terms of your license.

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> Original source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...

It looks like Parallels has the same restrictions that you'd get from running Win11 ARM inside the UTM hypervisor on M1/M2 Macs (like I currently do): No WSL/WSA and no virtualization based security or sandboxes.

It's not perfect, but if you buy Parallels, it does have automated ARM-based setup of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Kali. Which makes more sense anyway - then you are running 2 VMs on your host, instead of a VM and a VM inside a VM (because WSL2 is just a lightweight VM).

> (because WSL2 is just a lightweight VM).

It does use Hyper-V if I remember correctly.

To date, nested virt on m1/m2 is not possible which is a huge bummer.

You should be able to run WSL1 inside an aarch64 windows vm however.

Does Hyper-V not support nested virtualization? Or maybe macOS doesn't support it. Because M2 chips absolutely have FEAT_NV2 so nested virt should work well; only ARM system around with it. One more win for Asahi Linux, I guess.

Yeah, I was just looking for that one. It seems to be somehow supported in Linux (https://lwn.net/Articles/919851/) and Hyper-V does do nested virtualisation (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-...) so... Either a delayed feature or yet another silly licensing thing.

At the moment the missing component is nested virtualization support in the macOS Virtualization Framework. Once added there would probably need to be some minor changes in Parallels to take use of it as well.

You can do nested virtualization under VMware and Windows 11 / Hyperv, but there are lots of caveats and requirements. So yes.

Why would you need WSL/WSA when Mac is already a *NIX?

Yes, macOS is a BSD - UNIX Certification and POSIX compliance is nice, but macOS does not behave the same way as Linux, which famously is not a Unix (it's even in the name), and POSIX compliance doesn't mean much today: even Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 were POSIX compliant with SFU.

From what I gather from people with far more experience than me: if you need a "Linux-compliant" environment you're better-off with WSL2 than macOS.

I'd argue you're better off with macOS + something like Parallels or, if you just need ubuntu, multipass. Introducing Windows to get a Linux-compliant environment is reaching around your back to scratch your elbow.

My use case for WSL is slightly different: I work with developers who run Windows and I'd like to be able to figure out workflows that will work on their systems. A coworker today was having issues with running a Docker container that apparently had something to do with how Docker was interacting with WSL, but I couldn't reproduce on my Linux or Mac systems.

Lima[0] is also great if you just need command-line Linux.

[0]: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

> if you need a "Linux-compliant" environment

I'd willing to bet some pocket money that most people claiming that don't know what they're talking about

Unless you need, I dunno, DBUS? Or are specifically building stuff for Ubuntu/Red hat etc

I had a lot of trouble getting any FPGA software running on Mac. But Linux it just runs/builds out of the box.

Although if you have windows it also tends to run there too.

Ah true, some SW is built for specific Linux distros (on one side, it's hard to build an "universal binary" but on the other side, I've seen very ugly software installs)

Usually are the folks that equate Linux with UNIX, and complain about other UNIXes when they don't offer Linux specific syscalls.

MacPorts makes your Apple a Unix box in userspace and has most of the apps and frameworks and languages.

WSL2 is just running a Linux in a VM. You can do that with VirtualBox and other hypervisors. You can also spin up a Kubernetes runtime that supports Apple's Hypervisor Framework.

How does Windows behave anywhere closer to Linux than MacOS? Why would I want my os to behave like Linux? M1/Arm compatibilities aside.

My mac using coworkers constantly complain that the *NIX parts of Mac are ancient and out of date and already use a linux VMs on top of Mac for better bash or whatever.

Which parts in particular? I’ve seen literally hundreds of developers use macOS (including myself) for over a decade either at work/ conferences/meetups and never seen them use a Linux VM apart from something like docker, etc.

brew install bash has always worked for me.

what's wrong with zsh?

It’s fine unless you need to run a bash script.

But then you have to deal with a VM on top of the host macOS. IMO it's way easier to install brew, install an up to date copy of bash (which is more recent than Ubuntu has), and coreutils, and just use macOS. Having to do gls occasionally (for GNU ls) is minorly annoying, but way less work than a whole freaking VM.

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/bash shows version 5.2.15.

https://packages.ubuntu.com/kinetic/bash (well http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/b/bash/bas...) shows 5.2.1+debian/ubuntu patches.

They might be bumping into old versions of utilities up to just before GPLv3.

From GPLv3 onwards, Apple has had to leave installation of newer versions of tools to users, legally, our publish their own proprietary IP, Stallman’s objective some would say.

> [or] publish their own proprietary IP

That’s simply FUD. Apple seemed to be able to use GPLv2 without any consequences, and GPLv3 has all the same properties in that regard. The real reason is likely this:

https://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

[…]

Anyway, the message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Is there any reason to use GCC over Clang these days? I haven't used GCC in the past 5-6 years, and I don't miss it.

From what I hear, Clang development has slowed to a crawl and GCC leads in new standards compliance and features, since major past Clang supporters have stopped contributing to concentrate on their own languages.

But I see that user ‘pjmlp’, who probably has a much more informed opinion than mine, is posting in this thread.

> That’s simply FUD

Possibly to your assertion, it's what we engineers were at some point internally trained by legal was the concern.

Then your were lied to (or legal was incompetent). GPL has no way to force anyone to publish internal proprietary source code. Any copyright infringer always has the option to stop distributing. If they want to keep distributing something, they have the option to re-implement the missing functionality themselves.

Well I was there for years, and it seems Apple legal should know more about this as a concern than most, and they clearly didn't lie to us about it being a concern for _them_. (Still consistent with your point: it could be their own fear/uncertainty/doubt.)

Perhaps legal decided the fiasco wasn't worth a protracted court battle, and PR digressions, and foisted the option of re-implementing missing modernized functionality on homebrew/macports, on purpose?

Well, I would tend to trust the FSF’s legal opinions about the GPL over that of Apple’s lawyers. Addidionally, Apple didn’t seem to have a problem with GPLv2, and GPLv3 is no more copyleft than v2 was. Finally, the “might be forced to release proprietary code” story is, while FUD, extremely well-known FUD, repeated for decades industry-wide by GPL naysayers, and would be an appropriate choice for a believable story to tell the programmer employees.

If Apple merely wanted to save on work and dump it all on third-party ports, why not remove packages outright or, for a period of time, make them available as official add-ons? Why, in that case, keep ancient versions as part of the OS? Why remove something as widely used as Samba, which as I recall garnered some criticism at the time? It seems likely to me that Apple has some other reason than that to remove all GPL-licensed packages.

They are quite up to date with UNIX, what they aren't is GNU clones.

Furthermore WSL cannot even compile anything

AFAIK gcc et al works just fine in WSL.

I used WSL2 on Windows 10 to compile the WSL2 kernel with additional flags supporting wireguard. So I'm pretty sure compiling works, maybe it was an issue with WSL1?

I concede technically yes it can compile some things but there is such a large catalog of software which fails to compile in WSL2 it’s frustrating. A great example is the many Python modules with c extensions.

Docker has much better IO perf with lot of small files on WSL vs Mac. Currently doing Rails development and had to revert to running local straight up on Mac vs Docker because on Docker it was extremely slow. This of course means more testing on prod like cloud envs so it is really a load of crap.

I've experienced this with IO performance for huge files too. A while back I setup a caching service on a spare older Mac Mini first with Docker for macOS and when it couldn't keep up I installed Windows and it was slightly better but still crap. I threw Ubuntu on it and I was saturating the gigabit connection without breaking a sweat.

I'm also a Rails dev and I do all my dev work on an M1 mac and don't even have Docker installed, though I've heard it has improved a lot recently.

Ok but why on Earth would you run WSL in Windows on macOS when you could just run Linux on macOS or (gasp) use the UNIX layer in macOS for your hackery? Does WSL have some special sauce I'm missing out on? I never found it more compelling than more mature solutions like Cygwin, docker, or a regular VM.

Have you used the later versions of WSL (WSL 2 under Windows 11)? You have seamless bidirectional file system access, GUI applications that mesh with the rest of the desktop, can use Windows Terminal and have other tabs with PowerShell open, no network setup or fiddling required. It's impressively convenient.

Right, but that's still one layer of abstraction above a native unix system, which macOS is.

I've had a licensed copy of Win11 Arm running in Parallels for months. I just installed the dev version as mentioned in the AT article. At first it wouldn't let me buy a license, but at some point a few months ago it allowed me to buy a license and that has been fine ever since. Runs great. Good that the support has become official now.

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