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Experience report and speculation- I have used Linux (fedora-xfce) inside VMWare Fusion on Mac laptops on a daily basis for at least the last decade, and also

Experience report and speculation- I have used Linux (fedora-xfce) inside VMWare Fusion on Mac laptops on a daily basis for at least the last decade, and also have run Linux on Thinkpad and System76 hardware from time to time. In general I find the trackpad experience of Linux-inside-VMWare-on-Mac to be basically identical to that directly on Mac, and much (much) better than either Linux on Thinkpad or on System 76. There is some oddness in the VMWare setup- in the VMWare parent process, over time, RAM usage grows, and a slight lag is introduced into the UI experience inside Linux (both trackpad and keyboard). When this gets too noticeable, I kill the VMWare parent (which does not kill the actual VMs), then restart it. The lag is eliminated, the memory leak is cleaned up, and the child VMs are not impacted. I imagine the abstracted event flow to be: HW -> Mac driver -> VMWare user space UI loop -> Linux generic driver -> Linux userspace while the Linux only event flow would be HW -> Linux driver -> Linux userspace While there is some jankiness in VMWare's delivery of events to the generic Linux driver that the kernel uses for the VMWare "hardware", the work happening in the Mac driver is the magic that delivers great experience.

jonahbenton 7y ago
LOL ridiculous downvote.
pfranz 7y ago
I few months ago I tried really hard to get smooth-scrolling on a Macbook pro running Windows/Linux vms. I was testing against VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and native boot. I never got a satisfying result. Windows on hardware with specific software, like Edge, was the only environment I could get smooth scrolling. There was a lot of "it seems smooth to me" which made it harder to figure out if it was the hardware, VM, OS, or application (there are a lot of Firefox advanced settings to make it "Mac-like"--which aren't). As for mouse movement, like you're saying it's pretty good in a VM when it's HW -> macOS -> sending X and Y values to the VM and guest OS. Windows on hardware, even using Apple's drivers, is a bit "off." I lose drags, moving around is odd, and I feel like I have to be more deliberate with clicking. I never seem to have those issues when using Windows inside a VM.

jonahbenton 7y ago

LOL ridiculous downvote.

pfranz 7y ago

I few months ago I tried really hard to get smooth-scrolling on a Macbook pro running Windows/Linux vms. I was testing against VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and native boot. I never got a satisfying result. Windows on hardware with specific software, like Edge, was the only environment I could get smooth scrolling. There was a lot of "it seems smooth to me" which made it harder to figure out if it was the hardware, VM, OS, or application (there are a lot of Firefox advanced settings to make it "Mac-like"--which aren't). As for mouse movement, like you're saying it's pretty good in a VM when it's HW -> macOS -> sending X and Y values to the VM and guest OS. Windows on hardware, even using Apple's drivers, is a bit "off." I lose drags, moving around is odd, and I feel like I have to be more deliberate with clicking. I never seem to have those issues when using Windows inside a VM.