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Do the latest Macs still support running Windows via Boot Camp? What would you recommend if I need to run both Linux and Windows alongside MacOS? Virtualisatio

by pansa2 7y ago

Do the latest Macs still support running Windows via Boot Camp? What would you recommend if I need to run both Linux and Windows alongside MacOS? Virtualisation? Or would I be better off using more than one machine?

cpach 7y ago
Virtualbox is very good IMHO. Vmware also has a similar product.
- sdrothrock 7y ago
  Just a warning: Virtualbox with hard drive files on an external USB hard disk has been broken for me on Catalina on my both of my Mac Minis (late 2012, 2018) and iMacs (late 2012, mid 2017). That particular functionality worked fine on Mojave. It works fine as long as I keep my VDI files on my system drive, but that can be a pain since they're so large.
  - aruggirello 7y ago
    This is, in my experience, a major pain point of VirtualBox that I don't see why Oracle apparently doesn't care about, despite being aware of the issue since at least 2017. We're stuck in a situation where fixed-size disk images are too large to use if you care about your host's disk space (unless they're created with an "almost full" target usage), and dynamic sized images tend to grow to unwieldy sizes unless you regularly zero-out empty spaces from the guest (cat /dev/zero >somefile on Linux, sdelete -z C on Windows IIRC), then VBoxManage modifyhd --compact the image from the host once the VM is off. But it shouldn't be this way. VirtualBox added support for TRIM years ago, and guest OSes could very well happily live inside dynamic images - if it worked at all. In practice (AFAIK, for the few who ventured to use it) - it doesn't work: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795
  - verisimilitude 7y ago
    External VDIs -- that's exactly my use-case, but I've stayed back on Mojave. Any bug page I should follow to see if this gets resolved for Catalina?
    - sdrothrock 7y ago
      I'm not sure, honestly; there used to be a really long forum thread with random hacks that helped some (but not all) people and there were apparently a lot of conflated bugs that confused the whole thing, so I stopped trying to follow it and gave up.
filleduchaos 7y ago
...I mean no offence with this, but I believe it's rather easy to look up the status of a literally official Apple product/project like Boot Camp? https://support.apple.com/boot-camp https://support.apple.com/boot-camp
- slavik81 7y ago
  That gets you Windows and OSX, but it's really easy to break the Windows partition when you install Linux. To triple-boot, you start with OSX, then install Windows via Boot Camp, then resize the Windows partition to make some empty space after it for your Linux install. Then you install refind, and follow up with installing Linux. You need to do it that way because Boot Camp won't let you leave any empty space on the drive, and you can't put your Linux partition in front of the Windows partition, because the Hybrid MBR partition table that Windows needs can only count to 4 (or something like that). On the bright side, I think triple-booting is more robust than it used to be. It's been a while since the last time I borked Windows.
  - smallstepforman 7y ago
    I used to triple boot OSX, Windows and Haiku, but a windows update borked Win10 boot manager. The Win recovery tool doesn’t allow you to mount an EFI boot partition to bless the Win partition since heaven forbid a user may damage the boot manager (which is the entire point of running the recovery tool). The (re)install USB stick didnt like the partition table and refused to reinstall Win10. Now I triple boot with a Linux flavour of the month. Suprisingly, Haiku gets the most uptime on the MacBook Pro.
  - cmurf 7y ago
    It's 2020 and they're still doing that chickenshit hybrid MBR crap that violates their own goddamn Tech Note? https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2166/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS10003927-CH1-SUBSECTION11 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2166... A hybrid MBR by definition is not GPT compliant. And failure to comply does in fact routinely result in the loss of user data. It was always appalling incompetency by Apple that Boot Camp ever used hybrid MBR for even one day. To still be doing this in 2020 I consider bordering on malicious. There's no legitimate technical reason for this.
steeleduncan 7y ago
It depends exactly what you want linux for, but if it is command line stuff, then Windows Subsystem for Linux is ok. WSL is just a linux syscall wrapper around the Windows kernel, so it isn't a perfect replica, but WSL2 runs a customised linux kernel alongside windows, so it should very close.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  I just use Linux for the games.
heelix 7y ago
I run VMWare fusion on my Mac for virtualization. Being able to bump the Linux desktop to what the full retina screen can handle is glorious (though I had to fiddle with sizes on the terminal to find something that my eyes could work with). Got a Windows VM for the occasional MSI things that head my way. Nice access to the hardware - disk, cpu, memory - with a lot of snapshot management. I've got both Oracle's VirtualBox and VMWare's product, and VMWare is superior on everything but the price.
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  What’s superior with VMWare? I’m a virtual box user (via vagrant) but would switch for a compelling feature set. Performance, IPv6?
  - heelix 7y ago
    The snapshot options are much better in fusion, for that solo workflow, then stock virtualbox. I suspect vagrant covers those gaps. Long running (and pausing) VMs behave better on fusion. I see better stability when pushed hard. Better use of the hardware. Been a long time since I ran benchmarks, but the same VM was about 4-10 seconds faster on a 2 minute process. Not enough to matter for most. The native disk access helps with things that are IO sensitive. The UI drivers are better... so if you open up and run a Linux desktop, it feels much more native, if that is a thing. I don't think I've even opened virtualbox in the last couple years... so my comparisons may be dated. YMMV
    - gorgoiler 7y ago
      Thanks for the write up.
      - lloeki 7y ago
        I’ll add idle usage. VirtualBox shaves one-two hours off my MBP’s battery while Fusion leaves it untouched. Vbox graphics performance also left much to be desired: e.g dragging a terminal window around was slow, produced insane tearing and huge performance impact, and no amount of tuning would help; I’m not even talking about 3D stuff, this is just some plain X lightweight WM without a compositor. No such issue on Fusion, where I just imported the same VM.
veidr 7y ago
Yes, absolutely virtualization works so much better. In fact you can boot Mac and run VMWare Fusion, or boot into Windows 10 and use either Windows Subsystem for Linux or VMWare Workstation, and you will have a pretty great experience with Linux. OTOH if you try to install Linux on any recent MacBook Pro, you are in for hours and hours of googling weird shit with like only 2 comments on forums you have never heard of, and you will still never get Wi-Fi, sound, and sleep/hibernation all working at the same time. It's just not worth it. If you are so hardcore about software freedom that you demand to install Linux natively on the metal then you should absolutely not, now or ever, buy a Mac. OTOH if you just need to like, build some shit that only builds and runs on Linux, and you have $200 — VMWare. I don't like VMWare in theory (the Monsanto of tech companies) but I sure like them a lot in practice. I have needed a Mac/Windows/Linux laptop for my job for the past decade. In former times, I installed Windows and Mac OS X, and ran the latest Ubuttnu in either VMWare Workstation or VMWare Fusion. But since 2016 I just use VMWare Fusion for both Windows and Linux. If you want to use a Mac, I am confident that's the "best" approach. (For me, that means "runs all GUI and CLI programs reasonably well, with the minimum hours per year spend fucking with shit just to make it work. But if you actually need efficient GPU acceleration or real high performance (like not a web app or GUI app, but some kind of computationally expensive whatever) under Linux — well, then get something other than a Mac.)
- 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  I run multiple OSes as part of my job. The small investment in VMWare Fusion was worth it but I still need some dedicated machines. I just have a few issues: Problem #1: Disk space requirements. I have a late 2013 MBP and windows gobbles up a min 60GB for the image, which is 1/4th my SDD. This is why I ended up buying cheap beige boxes for every other OS (or AWS). Problem #2: Clipboard on VMWare is a trainwreck. Same goes for VNC and Microsoft Remote Desktop which I also use. My workaround is to use a text file on my router's USB drive so that I cut and paste through that in each OS. ----> I would pay someone $1,000 to come to my house and fix my clipboard problems. Problem #3a: The magic mouse blows chunks on anything but macOS. And even running Excel on macOS is impossible with a magic mouse. The left-right slop makes it difficult to scroll vertically without drifting diagonally... I don't know how macOS apps solve that. Problem #3b: I would kill for a mouse with a real middle button, not a scroll+button. Unix/X middle click paste is a feature I sorely miss on macOS and Windows.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> What would you recommend if I need to run both Linux and Windows alongside MacOS? Virtualisation? Or would I be better off using more than one machine? This really depends on whether you prefer Apple hardware or not. If you want Macbook hardware, use virtualization. If you want any kind of desktop or a laptop where everything isn't soldered and epoxied together, get whatever PC you want and then put the cheapest available Mac Mini in a corner and access it with remote desktop or similar as necessary. Another good solution is to buy a used Macbook which is old enough to have a rundown battery but not so old it won't run a recent macos, and then you get a better price and the battery doesn't matter because you're not actually using it as a laptop.
MonaroVXR 7y ago
I would buy a normal computer and virtualize MacOS on it. You can do that with VMWare Workstation or anything else, but VMWare is better for it. That's what I would do.

by pansa2 7y ago

cpach 7y ago

Virtualbox is very good IMHO. Vmware also has a similar product.

sdrothrock 7y ago
Just a warning: Virtualbox with hard drive files on an external USB hard disk has been broken for me on Catalina on my both of my Mac Minis (late 2012, 2018) and iMacs (late 2012, mid 2017). That particular functionality worked fine on Mojave. It works fine as long as I keep my VDI files on my system drive, but that can be a pain since they're so large.
- aruggirello 7y ago
  This is, in my experience, a major pain point of VirtualBox that I don't see why Oracle apparently doesn't care about, despite being aware of the issue since at least 2017. We're stuck in a situation where fixed-size disk images are too large to use if you care about your host's disk space (unless they're created with an "almost full" target usage), and dynamic sized images tend to grow to unwieldy sizes unless you regularly zero-out empty spaces from the guest (cat /dev/zero >somefile on Linux, sdelete -z C on Windows IIRC), then VBoxManage modifyhd --compact the image from the host once the VM is off. But it shouldn't be this way. VirtualBox added support for TRIM years ago, and guest OSes could very well happily live inside dynamic images - if it worked at all. In practice (AFAIK, for the few who ventured to use it) - it doesn't work: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795
- verisimilitude 7y ago
  External VDIs -- that's exactly my use-case, but I've stayed back on Mojave. Any bug page I should follow to see if this gets resolved for Catalina?
  - sdrothrock 7y ago
    I'm not sure, honestly; there used to be a really long forum thread with random hacks that helped some (but not all) people and there were apparently a lot of conflated bugs that confused the whole thing, so I stopped trying to follow it and gave up.

filleduchaos 7y ago

...I mean no offence with this, but I believe it's rather easy to look up the status of a literally official Apple product/project like Boot Camp? https://support.apple.com/boot-camp https://support.apple.com/boot-camp

slavik81 7y ago
That gets you Windows and OSX, but it's really easy to break the Windows partition when you install Linux. To triple-boot, you start with OSX, then install Windows via Boot Camp, then resize the Windows partition to make some empty space after it for your Linux install. Then you install refind, and follow up with installing Linux. You need to do it that way because Boot Camp won't let you leave any empty space on the drive, and you can't put your Linux partition in front of the Windows partition, because the Hybrid MBR partition table that Windows needs can only count to 4 (or something like that). On the bright side, I think triple-booting is more robust than it used to be. It's been a while since the last time I borked Windows.
- smallstepforman 7y ago
  I used to triple boot OSX, Windows and Haiku, but a windows update borked Win10 boot manager. The Win recovery tool doesn’t allow you to mount an EFI boot partition to bless the Win partition since heaven forbid a user may damage the boot manager (which is the entire point of running the recovery tool). The (re)install USB stick didnt like the partition table and refused to reinstall Win10. Now I triple boot with a Linux flavour of the month. Suprisingly, Haiku gets the most uptime on the MacBook Pro.
- cmurf 7y ago
  It's 2020 and they're still doing that chickenshit hybrid MBR crap that violates their own goddamn Tech Note? https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2166/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS10003927-CH1-SUBSECTION11 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2166... A hybrid MBR by definition is not GPT compliant. And failure to comply does in fact routinely result in the loss of user data. It was always appalling incompetency by Apple that Boot Camp ever used hybrid MBR for even one day. To still be doing this in 2020 I consider bordering on malicious. There's no legitimate technical reason for this.

steeleduncan 7y ago

It depends exactly what you want linux for, but if it is command line stuff, then Windows Subsystem for Linux is ok. WSL is just a linux syscall wrapper around the Windows kernel, so it isn't a perfect replica, but WSL2 runs a customised linux kernel alongside windows, so it should very close.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
I just use Linux for the games.

heelix 7y ago

I run VMWare fusion on my Mac for virtualization. Being able to bump the Linux desktop to what the full retina screen can handle is glorious (though I had to fiddle with sizes on the terminal to find something that my eyes could work with). Got a Windows VM for the occasional MSI things that head my way. Nice access to the hardware - disk, cpu, memory - with a lot of snapshot management. I've got both Oracle's VirtualBox and VMWare's product, and VMWare is superior on everything but the price.

gorgoiler 7y ago
What’s superior with VMWare? I’m a virtual box user (via vagrant) but would switch for a compelling feature set. Performance, IPv6?
- heelix 7y ago
  The snapshot options are much better in fusion, for that solo workflow, then stock virtualbox. I suspect vagrant covers those gaps. Long running (and pausing) VMs behave better on fusion. I see better stability when pushed hard. Better use of the hardware. Been a long time since I ran benchmarks, but the same VM was about 4-10 seconds faster on a 2 minute process. Not enough to matter for most. The native disk access helps with things that are IO sensitive. The UI drivers are better... so if you open up and run a Linux desktop, it feels much more native, if that is a thing. I don't think I've even opened virtualbox in the last couple years... so my comparisons may be dated. YMMV
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    Thanks for the write up.
    - lloeki 7y ago
      I’ll add idle usage. VirtualBox shaves one-two hours off my MBP’s battery while Fusion leaves it untouched. Vbox graphics performance also left much to be desired: e.g dragging a terminal window around was slow, produced insane tearing and huge performance impact, and no amount of tuning would help; I’m not even talking about 3D stuff, this is just some plain X lightweight WM without a compositor. No such issue on Fusion, where I just imported the same VM.

veidr 7y ago

Yes, absolutely virtualization works so much better. In fact you can boot Mac and run VMWare Fusion, or boot into Windows 10 and use either Windows Subsystem for Linux or VMWare Workstation, and you will have a pretty great experience with Linux. OTOH if you try to install Linux on any recent MacBook Pro, you are in for hours and hours of googling weird shit with like only 2 comments on forums you have never heard of, and you will still never get Wi-Fi, sound, and sleep/hibernation all working at the same time. It's just not worth it. If you are so hardcore about software freedom that you demand to install Linux natively on the metal then you should absolutely not, now or ever, buy a Mac. OTOH if you just need to like, build some shit that only builds and runs on Linux, and you have $200 — VMWare. I don't like VMWare in theory (the Monsanto of tech companies) but I sure like them a lot in practice. I have needed a Mac/Windows/Linux laptop for my job for the past decade. In former times, I installed Windows and Mac OS X, and ran the latest Ubuttnu in either VMWare Workstation or VMWare Fusion. But since 2016 I just use VMWare Fusion for both Windows and Linux. If you want to use a Mac, I am confident that's the "best" approach. (For me, that means "runs all GUI and CLI programs reasonably well, with the minimum hours per year spend fucking with shit just to make it work. But if you actually need efficient GPU acceleration or real high performance (like not a web app or GUI app, but some kind of computationally expensive whatever) under Linux — well, then get something other than a Mac.)

0xff00ffee 7y ago
I run multiple OSes as part of my job. The small investment in VMWare Fusion was worth it but I still need some dedicated machines. I just have a few issues: Problem #1: Disk space requirements. I have a late 2013 MBP and windows gobbles up a min 60GB for the image, which is 1/4th my SDD. This is why I ended up buying cheap beige boxes for every other OS (or AWS). Problem #2: Clipboard on VMWare is a trainwreck. Same goes for VNC and Microsoft Remote Desktop which I also use. My workaround is to use a text file on my router's USB drive so that I cut and paste through that in each OS. ----> I would pay someone $1,000 to come to my house and fix my clipboard problems. Problem #3a: The magic mouse blows chunks on anything but macOS. And even running Excel on macOS is impossible with a magic mouse. The left-right slop makes it difficult to scroll vertically without drifting diagonally... I don't know how macOS apps solve that. Problem #3b: I would kill for a mouse with a real middle button, not a scroll+button. Unix/X middle click paste is a feature I sorely miss on macOS and Windows.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> What would you recommend if I need to run both Linux and Windows alongside MacOS? Virtualisation? Or would I be better off using more than one machine? This really depends on whether you prefer Apple hardware or not. If you want Macbook hardware, use virtualization. If you want any kind of desktop or a laptop where everything isn't soldered and epoxied together, get whatever PC you want and then put the cheapest available Mac Mini in a corner and access it with remote desktop or similar as necessary. Another good solution is to buy a used Macbook which is old enough to have a rundown battery but not so old it won't run a recent macos, and then you get a better price and the battery doesn't matter because you're not actually using it as a laptop.

MonaroVXR 7y ago

I would buy a normal computer and virtualize MacOS on it. You can do that with VMWare Workstation or anything else, but VMWare is better for it. That's what I would do.