TL DR Windows = Parallels and anything else is probably as good if not better under UTM.If you want to run an operating system on a virtual machine, you must have a license, but there are many free operating systems that you can test for free. yeah.Īs you can tell, I have opinions but I'm unimpressed (for the cost) by Parallels. For the latter reason, Ubuntu 21.04 fully updated (latest kernel) fails to boot without intervention or modification in Parallels due to this bug and this has been patched for UTM and for Parallals. Other than that UTM outshines it for anything else, far more customisable, supports emulation (not just virtualisation, want to run Mac OS 9? Go ahead, Windows XP? Sure, they do the job in a pinch), free, real GPU support for macOS, offers Apple hypervisor support for linux (very basic atm) and offers excellent support by knowledgable developers in the field. Now as a package, if you want to run Windows and just Windows with fairly decent GPU performance Parallels is your only option, other advantages (IMO) are (easy) snapshotting, easy driver installation with correct resolutions, sharing support, cohesion and of course commercial support.

For macOS, UTM is better as whilst both utilise the Apple Hypervisor framework, UTM has implemented paravirtualized graphics support, making it infinitely better than the typically crap software GPU acceleration that most mac VMs suffer with. A noticeable factor as GPU performance is important but UTM still runs Windows okay with correct scaling but a little harder and involved to setup.įor Linux, UTM is better as it's basically identical in terms of performance.

Speaking initially and just regarding performance, GPU performance for Windows is best on Parallels but otherwise on par with UTM.

Qemu m1 mac