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Comment by oasisbob | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to find an option for running x86 Windows software on MacOS/Apple Silicon performantly. (LiDAR point cloud processing.)

The possibilities seem endless and kinda confusing with Windows on ARM vs Rosetta and Wine, think there's some other options which use MacOS's included virtualization frameworks.

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Have you tried CloudCompare? Native Mac ARM support.

https://www.cloudcompare.org/

(Edit: just so you know, the UI is a bit weird, there is a bit of a learning curve. But the app behaves in a very sane manner, with every step the previous state is maintained and a new node is created. It takes time to get used to it, but you'll learn to appreciate it.

May your cloud have oriented normals, and your samples be uniformely distributed. Godspeed!)

I like cloudcompare, but it's not really in the same space. I'm trying to achieve bulk tile processing of large datasets using LASTools

That’s interesting; I’d expect something techie like that to have good Linux programs.

Have you tried to install Windows 11 ARM under UTM on Mac? UTM is a kind of open source Parallels. Then you'll run x86 software using Windows' variant of Rosetta. Probably slower than Rosetta but perhaps good enough.

I wanted to play around with Windows 11 for a while now. It boots in UTM just to the degree that I can confirm my suspicions that Windows 11 sucks compared to Windows 10, but is not otherwise usable. (MacBook Air M3, slightly outdated macOS)

In case others were similarly confused, I thought that UTM was commercial but it is Apache 2 https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/blob/v4.6.5/LICENSE

Try Whisky: https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky

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