Flip Flopping between macOS and Windows

[pshufd]

Am sitting here laughing at @LiE_ because he is me, just that he has publicly listed all his transactions.
I on the other hand am not saying a word

Now, I am currently using just a Windows 10 desktop, that I built last year (Ryzen 7, ASUS B550-f, Lian Li, BeQuiet and Thermaltake fans), and now fancy an M1 device.

Not really a major fan of laptops (as an IT person, I get sick of working on them), so the question is, Mac Mini or iMac 24". Not looking to spend too much, so, I think I have my answer there. However, something tells me, a few changes/refunds will happen in the process of obtaining an M1.

The struggles of being satisfied, sometimes

What I've found is that building a nice desktop gives you a lot of flexibility to explore options. It's harder because AS means that we're in flux.

I'm going with an M1X and want to see how well QEMU can run x64 on an AS. I expect to see Windows and even macOS Intel running on the M1X in 2022. Unofficially of course.

 

[Steve Adams]

What I've found is that building a nice desktop gives you a lot of flexibility to explore options. It's harder because AS means that we're in flux.

I'm going with an M1X and want to see how well QEMU can run x64 on an AS. I expect to see Windows and even macOS Intel running on the M1X in 2022. Unofficially of course.

Yes, desktops give you flexibility. I was keeping my old 2006 acer for the firewire port, now I can sell it, or gift it to my father to use and I just have to install a firewire card in the back for my video camera. That's just one example.

 

[allan.nyholm]

@LiE_ Congratulations on your new iMac

For someone who's also been flip flopping between building PC's and having various Macs through 2 decades, I am right there with you.

I'm content with having a Windows virtual machine on my current Intel iMac for those odd cases where I need to build any of my cursor sets for Windows or just to run Amiga emulation and the like.
Next stop for me is probably not any M-series iMac, but rather a specced out i7 or i9 iMac from 2019 or 2020.
Of course, knowing myself - I wouldn't hesitate accepting an M1 iMac should it be presented to me and my wallet was 5 meters thick filled with cash and the mood was right over buying an Intel iMac. Windows would have be on standby.

The blue M1 iMac I've seen in-store is very nice and I don't think that I would have an issue going from 27" to 24" just from what I've seen.

I've however just sold my Macs and PCs at a huge loss, because I figured that I wanted to get rid of them because I am but one man and one pair of eyes. I could have been better at price setting my Macs, but the PCs were already half the value after unpacking and building the Hackintosh / Windows PC. I realized that I really wanted a Mac and that Hackintoshing at the time was so annoying.

 

[pshufd]

@LiE_ Congratulations on your new iMac

I've however just sold my Macs and PCs at a huge loss, because I figured that I wanted to get rid of them because I am but one man and one pair of eyes. I could have been better at price setting my Macs, but the PCs were already half the value after unpacking and building the Hackintosh / Windows PC. I realized that I really wanted a Mac and that Hackintoshing at the time was so annoying.

I guess I missed him getting a new iMac. But I look at them a few times a week.

I've tried just about every kind of Hack except for OpenCore and it isn't perfect but it's possible to find something that works well-enough. I don't mind using it as I see that the M1X systems are on the way. This morning, one of my Hacks rebooted and I looked into it and it was due to running out of VM. So I just increased VM from 20 GB to 32 GB and will increase the macOS RAM from 12 to 16 GB. I forgot that I was using the Linux VM for a couple of other things so didn't spec it high enough. I'll play around with this for a few days to see if it is stable.

My professional work is done in Windows. I'm hoping that Windows emulation is good enough on the M1X so that I can go all-in with it. If not, then I'll run a split desktop between Windows and macOS.

One other complication is the difficulty in getting parts. In normal times, I could just build an OpenCore Hack. Parts costs and reliability today are just crazy though.

 

[LiE_]

So managed to grab a PS5, much prefer it to the Series X I had.

Still very happy with the iMac and paired with the PS5 it's a compelling package.

 

[maflynn]

much prefer it to the Series X I had.

I opted to forego the PS5, and get the XBox X, I think Microsoft's offerings, and also direction is a more compelling direction. Plus the newest games from Bethesda (I'm a big fan of Bethesda games) will not be on the PS5. I've been waiting for Starfield, and that will definitely be an exclusive.

The new rachet and clank game looks amazing, and I loved playing Horizon zero dawn, but it looks like Sony is walking back from their commitment that all new games will be PS5 only. So the newer Horizon zero dawn game may also be released on the PS4

 

[TopherMan12]

I opted to forego the PS5, and get the XBox X, I think Microsoft's offerings, and also direction is a more compelling direction. Plus the newest games from Bethesda (I'm a big fan of Bethesda games) will not be on the PS5. I've been waiting for Starfield, and that will definitely be an exclusive.

The new rachet and clank game looks amazing, and I loved playing Horizon zero dawn, but it looks like Sony is walking back from their commitment that all new games will be PS5 only. So the newer Horizon zero dawn game may also be released on the PS4

That was never really a "commitment". Jim Ryan said "we believe in generations" and I think some in the gaming public read to much into it. Having said that, Ryan would have been better off being explicitly clear which games were going to be only PS5 only and which were cross gen. It was revealed last week that God of War was also going to be on PS4.

I don't have much need for an Xbox myself as everything on Xbox is on PC. Sony's support for PC has grown, but only long after the PS version.

 

[pshufd]

I've been mainly focusing on Virtual Machines lately and have tried VirtualBox, KVM/Linux, Windows/VMWare/Linux/KVM, Sosumi, macOS-Simple-KVM and most lately, Docker-OSX. Docker-OSX has the best performance and it will install and run Big Sur. The others require a fair amount of fiddling to run Big Sur. I don't want to run Big Sur, though. I want to run Monterey. I have only been able to get Monterey running on VirtualBox but it has some problems making it unusable.

I expect Docker-OSX to have Monterey Beta running in the next month or two and look forward to that. In the meantime, I will probably use Docker-OSX Catalina as it doesn't have the GUI lag problems of Big Sur. None of the Virtual Machine solutions supports audio and I use my 2015 MacBook Pro if I need audio. I suspect that I'm going to give in an order a Mini M1 with 16 GB of RAM. I would rather buy an M1X with 24 or 32 GB of RAM.

 

[Steve Adams]

I opted to forego the PS5, and get the XBox X, I think Microsoft's offerings, and also direction is a more compelling direction. Plus the newest games from Bethesda (I'm a big fan of Bethesda games) will not be on the PS5. I've been waiting for Starfield, and that will definitely be an exclusive.

The new rachet and clank game looks amazing, and I loved playing Horizon zero dawn, but it looks like Sony is walking back from their commitment that all new games will be PS5 only. So the newer Horizon zero dawn game may also be released on the PS4

I just bought a 50 dollar xbox controller and using my PC for gaming. Works great. More so with Game Pass ultimate.

 

[pshufd]

I'm back to running on Windows. My son's work laptop has a bulging battery and I loaned him one of my MacBook Pros so I took my other off my desktop today. I have an M1 Mini arriving tomorrow though. Today I have a Catalina KVM running on Windows and it's fine for iCal, Reminders and Notes. I'm running all of my other stuff on Windows.

I upgraded the desktop to 128 GB of RAM and 5 TB SSD and two video cards so it's driving 3x4K + 1xQHD. Tomorrow, I will plug the M1 Mini into two of the monitors, run my office stuff on it and monitor RAM. If the system starts to swap, then I might limit what I run on the Mini and move more to the Windows desktop.

This is one time when I wish I had a 5950X. It's nice to run a lot of cores at low frequencies to be more power efficient.

If the Mini can handle my office workload, then I might get another one to run my trading workload. I'd call it an M1X system as it's two M1 systems.

 

[slitherjef]

So, got a question since this is a thread of flip flopping and I can't personally make up my mind myself. Has any one here opted to install Linux and use it as a hypervisor to run either macOS or windows or all 3? It's probably time consuming and somewhat convoluted. I was thinking about doing something similar turn my windows 10 box into such. Install a Linux distro on the bare metal and a fresh install of windows 10 in a VM or hypervisor set up and just power up the VM as I need windows. I got a test bed set up on my low end somewhat problematic Linux box right now. It kind of works but the low-end CPU the box only has like 2 cores.

Kind of torn between trying the Linux KVM solution or just pulling out the too small ssd on the windows 10 box and replacing it with larger storage and doing a fresh install maybe upgrade to pro.

I do like the idea of virtualizing windows to sandbox it a bit more and easier to clone in case something goes whack with the system.

 

[pshufd]

So, got a question since this is a thread of flip flopping and I can't personally make up my mind myself. Has any one here opted to install Linux and use it as a hypervisor to run either macOS or windows or all 3? It's probably time consuming and somewhat convoluted. I was thinking about doing something similar turn my windows 10 box into such. Install a Linux distro on the bare metal and a fresh install of windows 10 in a VM or hypervisor set up and just power up the VM as I need windows. I got a test bed set up on my low end somewhat problematic Linux box right now. It kind of works but the low-end CPU the box only has like 2 cores.

Kind of torn between trying the Linux KVM solution or just pulling out the too small ssd on the windows 10 box and replacing it with larger storage and doing a fresh install maybe upgrade to pro.

I do like the idea of virtualizing windows to sandbox it a bit more and easier to clone in case something goes whack with the system.

It's actually really easy. I run VMware Player on Windows and virtualize Ubuntu. From there I can run:

• Sosumi - one line install for Catalina (maybe Mojave and High Sierra too)
• Simple-macOS-KVM - simple installer for HS through Catalina, Big-Sur branch is there but I haven't gotten it to work
• Docker-KVM - will do Catalina and Big Sur but I have had a lot of difficulty maintaining persistence of serial numbers and other hardware identification
• OSX-KVM - I've got Big Sur installed with this but it also has the persistence problem

I have been able to install High-Sierra through Monterey on VirtualBox. GUI performance is poor and it's difficult to get iCloud services working. I am currently running on Simple-macOS-KVM.

You can do the same thing directly on Linux as well. I set this up a while ago on a 2008 Dell XPS Studio and was able to get Mojave up and running. I suspect that I could get anything up and running right now after all of my experiments.

All of the KVM solutions, in my experience, have problems with audio. I think that some may have solved audio with pieces of OpenCore or stuff like USB devices.

My experience is also that having a ton of RAM and SSD really helps.

 

[slitherjef]

I'm curious about if it'd be worth trying to virtualize windows under Linux. I know it's possible but what about the maintenance? Mostly trying to maintain the Linux base. The box should be fairly decent to run a VM or two, first generation AMD Ryzen 1700x (I think) with 1080 Nvidia GPU (yeah I few generations behind but I do limited gaming. 16gb a ram however I can poach another 16gb from the current Linux box along with it's AMD rx580 GPU in addition and do PCI passthrough. I think I got an 800watt power supply to run things if not I'll probably need something in that range.

I'm pretty sure this is doable even single GPU the question is if it actually makes sense and worth the potential headache trying to maintain Linux as I'm far from a pro with it actually quite lost with it most of the time.

The approach would allow me to pretty much recycle most of what I have on hand though.

 

[pshufd]

I'm curious about if it'd be worth trying to virtualize windows under Linux. I know it's possible but what about the maintenance? Mostly trying to maintain the Linux base. The box should be fairly decent to run a VM or two, first generation AMD Ryzen 1700x (I think) with 1080 Nvidia GPU (yeah I few generations behind but I do limited gaming. 16gb a ram however I can poach another 16gb from the current Linux box along with it's AMD rx580 GPU in addition and do PCI passthrough. I think I got an 800watt power supply to run things if not I'll probably need something in that range.

I'm pretty sure this is doable even single GPU the question is if it actually makes sense and worth the potential headache trying to maintain Linux as I'm far from a pro with it actually quite lost with it most of the time.

The approach would allow me to pretty much recycle most of what I have on hand though.

There are lots of people comfortable with maintaining Linux. The main benefit of Linux is that it is a fantastic place to play around with tools to build bigger things. KVM/QEMU is available on Linux and works really well. It works like crap on Windows.

I was able to run Ubuntu KVM/QEMU on my 2008 Dell XPS Studio with a GT 1030. So it doesn't have to be modern hardware.

It's overall easier to get a cheap, used Windows system to do this with.

 

[slitherjef]

Playing around with computers is one reason I kind of got started with Linux, but it hasn't been without it's hair pulling lol. The main issues well, some image editing is a royal pain and while poking around with Linux just too look and see what I can do, I end up with a pretty much daily use computer that I don't want to change or erase to try something else. I don't know if I'm making sense.

Anyway I think I've gotten a little more comfortable with Linux but still need a few odds and ends from windows. My current Linux test bed was just that, it's the Ryzen 2200g it's fairly low powered and after running it for a while I want to go to some upgraded hardware (if you can call the Ryzen 1700 an upgrade since it's pretty old now).

As far as a base distro I'm a little unsure if I want to continue using that arch base or just go to Ubuntu. Arch gives me newer packages (and potential breakage) but Debian and Ubuntu seem more mainstream and sees more packages for more desktop like software.

🤔

 

[pshufd]

Playing around with computers is one reason I kind of got started with Linux, but it hasn't been without it's hair pulling lol. The main issues well, some image editing is a royal pain and while poking around with Linux just too look and see what I can do, I end up with a pretty much daily use computer that I don't want to change or erase to try something else. I don't know if I'm making sense.

Anyway I think I've gotten a little more comfortable with Linux but still need a few odds and ends from windows. My current Linux test bed was just that, it's the Ryzen 2200g it's fairly low powered and after running it for a while I want to go to some upgraded hardware (if you can call the Ryzen 1700 an upgrade since it's pretty old now).

As far as a base distro I'm a little unsure if I want to continue using that arch base or just go to Ubuntu. Arch gives me newer packages (and potential breakage) but Debian and Ubuntu seem more mainstream and sees more packages for more desktop like software.

🤔

We started using Linux at work back around 2005 or so but we had teams of people to support it and they took care of the tools, keeping it up and running, doing maintenance, etc. We were using Solaris before that.

There are some things that are fairly easy to do on Windows or macOS that are a lot harder on Linux or that require searching or effort. A fairly recent improvement, though, is the ability to easily run Windows or macOS in a Kernel Virtual Machine so you can just bring up Windows or macOS to perform some specific task in those operating systems.

 

[pshufd]

There is one area where my Windows system beats the M1 and that's video downloading of chunked videos. I subscribe to a service which provides financial analysis and they put out videos on the weekend and once a month on Vimeo and the videos are chunked. That is they are split into a large number of small mp4 files and you need software to assemble them into one large mp4 file. This takes about 25 minutes on my i7-10700 system running around 70% (I do it in a virtual machine so that I can avoid running at 100% CPU). I suspect that this runs faster on my Windows system than my M1 system. But this is one of those times when a 5900X or 5950X would be nice. Amazon has the 5900X at MSRP though not the 5950X yet. GPU prices are still insane even though I've heard that the Chinese are bulk dumping GPUs because of the CCP cracking down on mining.

Fortunately this is only something that I run once a week and once a month and I could just let it run at night and then view it in the morning. I assume that Vimeo uses this chunked approach to prevent people from copying the videos. I copy it to the home NAS for other family members to look at if they want to. It's also more convenient for me as I usually watch the videos in the living room on lower powered client computers.

 

[rezenclowd3]

Amd has the 5950x st msrp right now and I believe the 5900x.

 

[pshufd]

Amd has the 5950x st msrp right now and I believe the 5900x.

Thanks. I just checked my retail sites and Microcenter in Cambridge has them, 25+ in stock. Newegg, Amazon, B&H still sold by third parties and above MSRP. Maybe GPUs will be coming soon.

 

[keeper]

I sold my air to go iPad and gaming PC only.
Just got an M1 Mac Mini as it was to much hassle with the PC, use the mini for all my personal stuff and to act as a cctv server using security spy softwar.

so much better having everything synced using the same technolog.

 

[Blue Quark]

In the (now distant) past, I supported various MS OSs, from the later MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 systems up through Windows XP. I've also owned copies of various versions of Windows, and they've all been run on hardware I built myself.

That said, I've really never had much use for their OS. In times past I've had use for Word and Excel, but back then I did other stuff and frankly Windows running on some piss poor x86 box was a poor substitute for Classic Mac OS running on either 680x0 or PPC hardware. Obviously a lot has changed (even by the time I was full time supporting WinXP) but the truth is, other objections aside, it's never offered me anything I really needed. It certainly never offered me anything I didn't already have just using Classic Mac OS.

Honestly, I feel the future is with the Linux kernel and some form of construction of the GNU toolkit (or equivalent, one day, I suppose). Though they'll never say so publicly, even Microsoft knows this is the case. Their own kernel has run its course, and will at some point likely be replaced by Linux. Who knows: maybe they might at some point jump to Fuchsia. As Wayland and Pipewire mature, and possibly as various containerized application delivery systems likewise mature and the dust settles, getting big time commercial developers to port to Linux won't be the hassle it is today. In fact, it may wind up being the most robust platform they can develop for.

Now, why do I bring a sword to a gun fight? After all, this is in essence a variant of the Windows vs. macOS discussion, is it not? Well, perhaps that's the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it's a sword fight, and I've just brought a gun. Metaphorically, that is.

As Microsoft continues to iterate Windows and piss off users (who know better) and continue to enslave users (who don't, or who are simply somehow chained to it) what's actually happening is that this is an ever-shrinking market. There's fewer desktop computer owners today as a percentage of total computer-device ownership than there's probably ever been. The battlefield is not on the desktop, but on the tablet and smart phone. Microsoft at this point only has a presence there insofar as their office suite and related tools are considered relevant.

For my part, I have a tower I bought last year which has Windows 10 and Linux Mint dual booted on it. I now also own an M1 MacBook Air. I couldn't be happier, and love having continuing opportunities to study and learn and keep up to date with the technology world. But, at the same time, even though I recognize Microsoft's desktop presence is still significant and know that I need to accommodate it, I look at that as simply a professional requirement, and not something which on a personal level I care about. All of my data has long since been freed from any shackles, so I can play easily and instantly on any platform I choose to use.

 

[PeterJP]

I'm curious about if it'd be worth trying to virtualize windows under Linux. I know it's possible but what about the maintenance? Mostly trying to maintain the Linux base.

It's exactly what I started doing in an attempt to free me from the Intel shackles. I set up a server with Proxmox, which is a Linux distribution aimed at running VMs and easily configurable with a web interface. In that, I'm running a couple of VMs. One of them is Windows. I have to say that I'm not doing anything fancy like gaming or audio/video processing so for me, that works fine. The fun with a VM is you can give it more RAM when you need it. My server currently has 16GB (another 16GB in back order because of the chip shortage... it's still DDR3) and my VM has 4GB, but if needed, I set it to 12GB and reboot.

It's actually really easy. I run VMware Player on Windows and virtualize Ubuntu. From there I can run:

• Sosumi - one line install for Catalina (maybe Mojave and High Sierra too)
• Simple-macOS-KVM - simple installer for HS through Catalina, Big-Sur branch is there but I haven't gotten it to work
• Docker-KVM - will do Catalina and Big Sur but I have had a lot of difficulty maintaining persistence of serial numbers and other hardware identification
• OSX-KVM - I've got Big Sur installed with this but it also has the persistence problem

I have been able to install High-Sierra through Monterey on VirtualBox. GUI performance is poor and it's difficult to get iCloud services working. I am currently running on Simple-macOS-KVM.
(...)
My experience is also that having a ton of RAM and SSD really helps.

RAM+SSD: so true.

Do you have experience with macOS on Proxmox? It's the next VM I'll be adding. Just for basic stuff. But if you want to go all-out, Nicholas Sherlock has a very good and well-maintained tutorial here. He runs Proxmox, but gives his macOS VM access to USB and GPU directly, which turns his machine into a Hackintosh desktop with other VMs running in the background. I'm not planning to do this, but it's quite a cool setup.

 

[pshufd]

I've heard about proxmox but it seems to be mostly used to connect to cloud hosts. I somewhat have the feeling that you can set these up at home without a cloud host as well.

 

[PeterJP]

I've heard about proxmox but it seems to be mostly used to connect to cloud hosts. I somewhat have the feeling that you can set these up at home without a cloud host as well.

Yeah, it's just a Linux system after all. Connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to your machine for installation. Then connect to it over the network with a web browser to configure the VMs. You can also SSH into it. When you set up a Windows VM, connect to it using remote desktop or VNC. You can also pass hardware or drives straight through to the VMs, which is what I do for my NAS VM. It works pretty well, but it would be nice to get your view on how it compares for speed versus the solutions you tried.

 

[pshufd]

Yeah, it's just a Linux system after all. Connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse to your machine for installation. Then connect to it over the network with a web browser to configure the VMs. You can also SSH into it. When you set up a Windows VM, connect to it using remote desktop or VNC. You can also pass hardware or drives straight through to the VMs, which is what I do for my NAS VM. It works pretty well, but it would be nice to get your view on how it compares for speed versus the solutions you tried.

I need to find an overview of the pieces. I would generally prefer to run it on the system that I'm using as I think that performance would be better. I have noticed that the developers working on OSX/KVM have been putting more effort into proxmox lately and that one guy has Monterey beta running on it.

Out of curiosity, why not just use VMware or KVM/QEMU instead of proxmox? I have the feeling that there are significant benefits to using proxmox (which is why people are moving to it) but I need to figure out the benefits. One thing that I've noticed in the VM world is that things move pretty fast.