Microsoft officially supports running Windows 11 on M1 and M2 Macs
techrepublic.comNow, Windows 11 can be streamed on Mac computers built with M-series processors using a Cloud PC and the Windows 365 service.
So it's not really running on the hardware? Am I missing something silly? How does this fundamentally differ from me RD or VNC'ing into my Windows machine? Other than the long list of limitations they list - which I don't have when RD'ing to my Windows box?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/options-for-usin...
I think they are saying that you can either stream a remote desktop, or run it in a virtualization tool and the license permits this. I don't think this means that Microsoft supports running Windows 11 natively on Mac M1 or M2. Which IMHO would be really nice (I prefer Windows as my OS but right now the Macs have a better hardware).
What do you mean by better hardware exactly? ASUS' Zenbook Duo like https://www.darty.com/nav/achat/informatique/ordinateur_port... are pretty awesome. I have the previous model with i9-12900H and it is amazing. Or LG Gramm if weight matters. Or TUXEDO InfinityBook if you need more RAM/2xSSD.
I can't access your link. I only know the Macs from what the rest of my family reports- insanely long battery life (days without recharging) and reasonable performance.
I can't imagine the battery life is very good in real world compared to the mac. I haven't tested nor have I looked at any benchmarks, so it's entirely possible I'm totally wrong. But I haven't heard people claiming performance similar to the mac.
The problem you’ll face is that this battery life is in equal measure software and hardware, at least in the intel days.
Running windows in boot camp drastically cut battery life.
Plenty of 2nd hand Macs which can last into 3rd to 5th hands. On non Macs, it is hard to find any matching brands that with closest maybe Thinkpads like those X2XX and X4XX series. Just walk into any laptop repair shops and ask them for opinions. Mac easily ranked highest....I know because I have friends and families working in that business. Also many developers I know even those working in Microsoft use Mac. Mac in general do have best hardware.
That’s all great, but irrelevant.
My point was that, and I say this from experience, if you get 8 hours of battery life on a MacBook running macOS you won’t get 8 hours running windows. You will get less, sometimes significantly less.
The person I originally replied to wanted to get a MacBook and put windows on it because the MacBook gets such great battery life. If they do put windows on it, the battery life won’t be so great anymore.
Could we re-title this because the impression is so different and I was quickly disappointed. Running on Parallels with Microsoft's approval was news months ago. And did anyone really think Macs wouldn't get approval for a cloud streaming service?
Yeah, this is a bit old from February -- nothing's changed here. VMware is still waiting for an official blessing, IIRC?
I'd rather use VMware Workstation/Fusion over Parallels (or UTM). Parallels gets grosser and ickier to me over the years while VMware seems to just remain one solid product.
> And did anyone really think Macs wouldn't get approval for a cloud streaming service?
That depends on whose approval you mean. Apple already blocked the release of Microsoft's xCloud streaming app on iOS.
Which Microsoft quickly worked around by building a PWA that is trivial to install and works great.
I’m more interested in the reverse. I’ve been building (resurrecting?) a game engine https://github.com/shawwn/noh and I was looking forward to my new M2 primarily so that I could finally do cross platform gamedev on a single machine. Mac, windows, Linux, all on one box.
Hah! Fat chance. It’s frustratingly close to working. But Linux Ubuntu arm has trouble using the M2’s GPU through Fusion, and Windows 11 ARM is … well, let’s just say that arm64 Windows isn’t a priority. Fmod won’t release an fmod lib for it, so the engine straight up has no sound. And I don’t know if I was able to get the graphics to work either.
It’s OpenGL man. This shouldn’t be that hard. But graphics is perpetually trapped in 1999 era developer experience.
For real though, I want to support Linux as a first class citizen. That means someone with Ubuntu should be able to boot and play the game just fine. Theoretically the engine should be good to go right now (anyone feel like running it?) but I don’t have any way in my life to verify that, short of literally buying three different workstations and testing them on each.
Parallels with Windows 10 and then Windows 11 ARM has worked stupendously for me for gaming. I don't know if it will help the developing another commercial product, but I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to run Windows in an M1/M2. (Not related, just a fan)
Thanks! I forgot about Parallels entirely. I'll try it out.
You can just use the Insider Preview (22000.1_PROFESSIONAL_ARM64_EN-US.ISO) and revert to Stable in a UTM VM.
These restrictions are completely arbitrary on the part of Microsoft. Source (My M1 Mac): https://freeimage.host/i/H4PgC5F
How is the performance? Battery life? Is it usable for long periods of time or just "good enough" to test a couple of things?
It's virtualization via QEMU, not emulation, I've not used it more than several hours heavily, but the battery drain from the virtualization aspect seems to be negligible. Perhaps Parallels has better 3D pass through or something, but it works for my use cases.
Yeah, the Parallels version is very good- enough to play mid-level games pretty comfortably.
Spoiler: It's not about running Windows 11 natively on Apple Silicon.
This announcement doesn't change anything, in practice, but it does suggest that more hardware support may be coming.
Uh....did we read the same article?? It's about natively running Windows 11 directly on ARM.
That is not what this article says at all. Quite the opposite.
To do so would probably require Apple to release some drivers (or hardware specs to Microsoft). It's not a matter of just "porting to ARM64" (which is already done), it's about porting to Apple's Apple Silicon platform.
No, it describes 2 options for running Windows: Streaming it from the cloud and virtualizing it via Parallels.
Windows lacks the drivers to run directly on M1/M2 Macs.
To be perfectly clear, the virtualization is for ARM, so you're getting native level performance with ARM apps and the Windows emulation of x86 instructions flies along pretty well too.
The 2015 Macbook Pro is still probably the best laptop (build quality, screen quality, keyboard, etc.) that you can run x86 Windows on directly. Is there any current windows laptop that doesn't feel like plastic junk compared to a Macbook?
Of course. Try a Razer Blade 13 - it's literally just a MacBook in black aluminium. It's scary how similar it is in build quality. I've had one for 2 years and all my MacBook using friends said that if they used Windows they would buy that as it's essentially a windows-running MacBook.
I have a 2020 Razer Blade. My only complaint is that the touchpad is garbage. If I move my finger too quickly it stops working. Doing a drag and drop with one finger doesn't work, I need to click/hold with one finger and do the dragging motion with a different finger. And I get so many false touches or palm touches even with the touch threshold as high as it goes.
Aside from that I love the machine. Metal construction, great screen, user-swappable RAM and SSD. 2 SSD's. But I always need to use an external mouse with it.
Oh and the battery life is also terrible. I've tried everything to completely disable the dedicated GPU while on battery, but things like Windows Search will use the nvidia graphics and not the Intel. So I get about 3 hours of battery with light usage.
I have the 15 from work, it’s terrible. Heavy, bad keyboard, constantly overheats, bad trackpad. Even the chassis is bad, pressing on the bottom causes a grate to touch a fan.
Not had any such problems with the 13, that's why I said 13 not 15.
HP Elitebooks are very good. Haven't tried Windows but Linux runs nicely.
Thinkpad Carbon X1, Microsoft Surface Laptop, and the HP Dragonfly.
Following compatibility and standards is always good, irrespective of who does it. It'd be great if they supported running .NET and WinForms on Ubuntu some day, might actually happen who knows!
Well, .NET is running on Ubuntu, if you consider .NET 5 upwards (previously .NET Standard/Core). In recent distributions it is even in the default package sources from Ubuntu. WinForms will never happen (although Mono's WinForms support was pretty good) as it targets the deprecated 4.6.x Framework.
That's great news! That means all .NET EXEs and DLLs will be cross-compatible with Ubuntu since 5.0? Mono had been doing substantial efforts since about a decade but was never the popular choice among Linux devs, mostly due to performance and other issues I think. With Microsoft themselves providing support, things must improve.
As for WinForms, there are probably newer alternatives like MAUI coming up since .NET core.
MAUI has had some growing pains and the rumors are that it's just a small team working on it at the moment. I think Microsoft may have bit off a bit more than they bargained for in part because they wanted to maintain a clear upgrade path for Xamarin.Forms and because they wanted to use native controls rather than just draw everything with Skia (like Flutter).
MAUI doesn't support Linux through official Microsoft channels, but there are people working on Linux support (I don't know what the state of that is at the moment).
.NET Core has been available on Linux for even longer then .NET 5. To make a long story short, Microsoft released .NET Core in 2016. Microsoft announced that .NET Core would be the future of .NET in 2019 and that .NET Framework (the old, proprietary, Windows-only .NET) would get security fixes and such, but wouldn't get any real updates. With .NET 5, Microsoft dropped the "Core" branding on .NET Core.
It's really easy to run things like .NET web services and such on Linux. You can even compile to a single binary.
Microsoft started retiring WinForms back in 2014. They open sourced it in 2018, but no one has really made adding support for non-Windows platforms a priority, especially since Microsoft put it into maintenance mode nearly a decade ago.
There are cross-platform GUI kits like AvaloniaUI and Uno Platform that some people like in addition to MAUI. Avalonia takes a Skia based approach like Flutter. Uno is a bit of a combination of Skia and some native widgets.
I sucessfully develop .NET REST APIs using ASP.NET Core since .NET 5 (and mostly using minimal APIs introduced in .NET 6) on my Mac using VSCode, Entity Framework Core (with Postgres+SQLite) and deploy it to Ubuntu VPSes. Flawless, and the only issue I ever encountered is rather fringe: I couldn't use AES128GCM algo for JWE token encryption, as it is only supported on Windows. Using the APIs on Linux/macOS will throw an Exception. I switched to AES128-CBC-HMAC instead for my JWE tokens, no big deal.
> That means all .NET EXEs and DLLs will be cross-compatible with Ubuntu since 5.0
Well, if compiled for the correct target framework, then yes. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/frameworks
Note that .NET nowadays is cross-plattform, that means still you cannot just execute any dll/exe that uses plattform dependent code. This is the same as any other C/C++/Java program, once you program calls into OS library/kernel APIs, it is no longer cross-platform and those APIs have to exist on your target. So no, if you use any Win32 feature using P/Invoke, the tool will not just automagically run on Linux.
Yes. Besides desktop GUI applications, I would say Linux is the primary deploy platform for .NET services these days.
Look at AvaloniaUI, it’s .NET and basically an open source, cross platform WPF: https://avaloniaui.net/
The state of tech reporting is at a level where I'm not really sure one can give it any trust for the headline story, let alone any secondary information they include.
In this article we see "Arm custom-made the M1 and M2 chips for Apple." That's false, Apple designed their own chip using the ARM reference designs.
And yesterday(1) on a Venture Beat article about the M2 in Apple's Keynote: "The chip will go into the Mac Studio product, which previously used Intel silicon."
Neither of these quotes are factual. Apple designed the M-series chips, and the Mac Studio has never existed with an intel inside.
(1)https://venturebeat.com/games/apple-unveils-m2-ultra-process...
For a moment I was disappointed that Microsoft was able to port Windows faster than the community to port Linux. Pfew, that's not it. I suppose running Linux streamed from the cloud or virtualized on M1 and M2 has never required any particular official support, MS is just very late. I'm surprised this support only comes now actually.
You're surprised that M$ took years to support industry standard features?
Maybe you're too young to remember Intel's Memory Management Unit sitting unused in windows machines for years before virtual memory space was available...
Right, now I'm surprised I was surprised.
Would using a Windows 11 vm have any risks of Windows 11 or a subprocess within Windows 11 configs from work affect anything on the Apple side? Can a Windows vm potentially scrape what is not part of its data volume as assigned by the vm software?
Useful news. I just RDP into a jump box if I need something Windows from my M1 macbook, but having a subset of that available on the same machine would be really helpful.
Parallels works great for running the ARM64 versions of Windows as well as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Alma Linux. I’ve also coerced it to run FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well with a little bit of effort. Ironically I haven’t gotten NetBSD to work on it yet.
UTM is also very good, and it has the ability to emulate other architectures. It’s not quite as performant or polished as Parallels though.
Lada officially supports mounting its engines on Mercedes.
TechRepublic doesn't seem to know what the word "running" means, because this ain't it.
What do you mean? This is windows ARM edition natively running on MacBooka, is it not?
Native implies running directly on the hardware, not streaming from the cloud or virtualized.
I wouldn’t say that Halo runs natively on iOS even though I can stream it through xCloud.
Unfortunately, that's just a form of metastasis 8-(
When M$ makes the realization that Apple made decades ago, and abandons it's proprietary kernel for a POSIX compliant (linux, BSD, etc) kernel then there will finally be hope for the world...