VMWare offers a generous free tier of their virtualization product for home users (aka free, non-commercial license). However, their registration process online is broken (but workarounds are available if you got the time to investigate it), at the time of writing.
The product itself is great. I’m using it to run Linux VMs and technically it runs really well. But, in terms of trying to recommend it to other people … no, not right now. Seeing how it is not possible to register for the license in a straightforward fashion, I simply cannot recommend the product as the average user will encounter too many problems getting started. Note: I’ll try update the article if I discover that VMWare fixes this issue in the future.
This article is not a tutorial on how to go through that process successfully. Instead, I want to talk about what I think VMWare is trying to do in the Mac market and my thoughts on what the state of the product is in right now.
Parallels Desktop always costs money, but is a solid choice
If you don’t care about paying for a license, you can stop reading now and just go download the trial version and later pay for a license. That’s completely fine by me! I promise. You got everything you need here to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems on a Mac, as long as you are aware of the limitations you may encounter with Apple silicon compatibility in regards to legacy operating system versions. Make sure you make some research before you decide whether to buy VM software or not.
Is Parallels gaining the upper hand?
On MacOS, Parallels has pushed their brand towards Mac users who switched from Windows. They increasingly come up as the number one alternative on the internet among home users. In recent years I have seen loads of Reddit posts come up asking for Parallels without any mention of Fusion anywhere. This might not worry the business-centric VMWare corporation, but it makes me wonder if there is an interest in the home market at all. Are there enough businesses using Fusion on Mac to motivate spending money on future product development?
Parallels and VMware have been competing ever since the Intel transition started. They have been standing side by side for a long time, offering improvements for each VM product. I hope VMWare continues to be a contender because competition is healthy and it means Parallels’ customers will benefit as well.
VMWare delivered too little, too late
The company says that Fusion 13, the first version with Apple silicon ARM support, is built using their past experience with the ARM architecture (you’ll find it in the section titled ”Some context”). They seem to think it will give them an advantage over Parallels. In theory it could have held true, but in reality the Fusion 13 release took an enormous amount of time to ship to customers and while Fusion is really good once you have installed it and configured everything ”just right”, Parallels delivered their product within reasonable time after the M1 was on the market while VMWare asked us to use a preview version. This cemented Parallels’ position as the go-to company for Mac virtualization in the home market.
I want to say great things about Fusion because I’m an avid, enthusiastic user of the product. And yet, here I am listing mostly their shortcomings on the Mac platform. I’m hoping to see something like a mid-cycle Fusion 13.5 release with bug fixes and performance improvements, more officially supported Linux AArch64 distros, a correctly handed registration process and an attempt at reaching out to the press on a wider scale, as well as seeing people get excited about it.
They need Fusion 14 to be close to perfect
When the time comes to ship version 14, the hurdles they had to go through to ship the first ARM-compatible release will be a thing of the past. That’s why I have higher hopes for the next version.
Remember: we need competition. Every virtualization product is likely to aim to be better if it’s challenged by someone else.
