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It’s interesting that VMWare would announce this. Perhaps Microsoft has given some indication to VMWare that they will sell Windows 11 ARM licenses once their exclusivity deal with Qualcomm expires. VMWare caters mostly to enterprises.
I listened to a VMware podcast where this was discussed. VMware decided that the Windows licensing situation was between Microsoft and the user, not between VMware and Microsoft, which seems appropriate to me.
 
Does it work as well as Rosetta 2?

It isn't possible for it to work as well - Rosetta 2 relies on custom hardware features of the Apple CPUs, while Microsoft's implementation is written for generic ARM.

It is possible that Microsoft might work with Apple to fix this in the future - Apple does have a facility for linux VMs to use Rosetta 2 internally coming in Ventura.
 
Im wondering how VMware will compare to Parallels on the M1...that should be the question one the day.
 
So can you do stuff like use the Windows Media Creation tool to generate a usb of windows 10 for PCs? I don’t think that’s possible.
Yes actually, it should run just fine. The tool itself can only create x86_64 images though, FWIW, so you cant create an ARM64 ISO, but you should be able to create ones for x86 just fine
 
The Asahi Linux folks are trying to achieve this for Linux - but they're relying on a lot of reverse engineering - kudos to them, but I'll be interested to see if they ever come up with anything truly stable - and I guess the killer app for Asahi Linux would be to breathe life into old Macs (once old Apple Silicon Macs are a thing) so even if they only ever support M1 that would be useful.
This is an aside, but they're already past the "only ever support M1" stage. It's unclear from their website because the alpha released in March is still the current release and the install page reflects that, but their July progress report on the blog talks about the M2 MacBook Pro working and they recently tweeted that fixes were made to get the M2 Air running as well. There doesn't seem to be instructions on how to try the development builds with the new machines, but it's likely the next time they do an official release those machines would be included. They also anticipate 3D acceleration should be working by the end of the year, although only OpenGL support initially. From what I understand, despite the lack of hardware features supported at this point it is stable enough for very specific use cases.

That project is very interesting to me because if there never ends up being any official support for ARM Windows on M1 after Qualcomm's exclusivity expires, the work the Asahi team is doing could be adapted to set up an extremely barebones Linux install that just boots directly into a Windows Virtual Machine with very little host OS overhead.
 
You can't run x64 windows, but you can run ARM windows, and ARM windows can run x64 windows apps/binaries via its equivalent to Rosetta 2

How does one do that in ARM Windows 11? Does it happen automatically when I try to run a x64 windows binary, or do I need to edit the properties of the file into some kind of "compability" mode e.g. by right-clicking the binary?
 
VMware Fusion 12 (the current release version, not just this Apple Silicon tech preview) is free for personal use. Why would you use a pirated, and potentially infected, version of a free app?

So true.

Perhaps the answer is...habit.
 
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Is there a way to download it without signing up for a VMware Customer Connect account?
 
Actually it wasn't a myth until sometime last year. Originally you did have to sign up to the insider program T&Cs & use a preview version that was almost certainly only licensed for evaluation use. That changed quietly and without fanfare shortly after Windows 11 was released. Parallels now offer an apparently (I Am Not A Lawyer) legitimate route to download a production copy of Windows 11 for ARM, paying for a license and activating it.

It's an urban myth when people continue to perpetrate it as todays truth...
 
I think people pick ubuntu because it is somewhat user-friendly.
Zorin, elementaryOS, Mint, Pop!_OS, SteamOS, and Peppermint are all user friendly too, even moreso than Ubuntu. People pick Ubuntu since it’s a recognizable name and the distro that started making Linux user friendly. However that was in the past. Nowadays there’s zero reason to run Ubuntu anymore other than you just hate yourself. The distro used to be good but using it is just a joke now with all the horrible decisions Canonical did to it such as Snaps and the fact there’s much better options now


There’s better Linux distros to use. I’d recommend Zorin nowadays to newcomers, especially since it has a macOS UI mode.

1659202313309.png
 
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It's been around longer than Windows 10. Before that it was Windows RT. (Windows 8) And still it's never sold well, and why should it, there's no compelling reason to buy it.
You are mixing up a lot of things.
Windows RT was for 32-bit ARM and had no x86 support.
Windows 10 provided 32bit x86
Windows 11 finally provides 64bit x86. (But still misses important parts of an actual, full solution, like fat binary support...)


You can look at this pathetic story (RT was 10 years ago, FFS) and ask why MS is so damn slow at implementing what's obviously essential to make this a useful, popular product. And that's a reasonable question. (And answers much of why "there was no compelling reason to buy it".

But that doesn't change that Win 11 is interesting (in a way that none of the predecessors were) because it FINALLY gets about 80% of the story in place (runs on modern ARM, AND can run modern x86).
MS has been boxed in by some issues they couldn't really control (they pretty much had to make the exclusive deal with QC); but the relentless slowness in getting to x86-64, and the (still!) lack of solution for fat binaries, are an ongoing reminder that Intel isn't the only member of Wintel that truly has no clue how to cope with the 21st century.
 
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Zorin, elementaryOS, Mint, Pop!_OS, SteamOS, and Peppermint are all user friendly too, even moreso than Ubuntu. People pick Ubuntu since it’s a recognizable name and the distro that started making Linux user friendly. However that was in the past. Nowadays there’s zero reason to run Ubuntu anymore other than you just hate yourself. The distro used to be good but using it is just a joke now with all the horrible decisions Canonical did to it such as Snaps and the fact there’s much better options now


There’s better Linux distros to use. I’d recommend Zorin nowadays to newcomers, especially since it has a macOS UI mode.

View attachment 2036720

Linux fans: "Stupid MS, making their product way too complicated with 30 different Windows 10 editions"

Also Linux fans: the above graph.

Perhaps if the Linux ecosystem spent more time on actual problems and less time on constantly reskinning what already exist, the phrase "year of the Linux Desktop" wouldn't be the joke it is?
 
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No. You're talking about Intel-based Macs, but everything about this release with regard to limitations is referring to Apple Silicon Macs.
OK, but "Windows 11 on Intel and Apple Silicon with 2D GFX and Networking" doesn't make that clear and reads like it's an intel limitation too
 
Fine but… M1 macOS has a built-in emulator.
Just let us run x86 virtualization emulated by the system itself. Shouldn’t that be possible?
Apple has a constrained emulation that serves its purposes. It only handles x86-64 (not 32bit, or 286 or 8086), it doesn't handle AVX and later, and it doesn't handle some specialized OS instructions. And Apple will almost certainly drop Rosetta2 as soon as they can, in two or three years.

If you demand/require all these non-supported x86 features, then these third party emulators are necessary. And this seems much of what the people touting these solutions are after --- ways to run really old x86 code (32bit and earlier) or ways to run x86 operating systems...
 
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FOR MY USES, I’d originally thought I would need to run a full-on Windows VM. Then I tried CrossOver on the two (2) Windows-only programs I sometimes access…and they work GREAT! My two apps are the Social Security AnyPIA tool (run it twice a year) and Uniden’s Sentinel software (run about once a month) - both are Windows-only programs and both run and do exactly what I need.
 
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I thought VMWare said that they couldn’t support Windows because of licensing issues- does this mean that Microsoft is supporting this now?
 
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It isn't possible for it to work as well - Rosetta 2 relies on custom hardware features of the Apple CPUs, while Microsoft's implementation is written for generic ARM.

It is possible that Microsoft might work with Apple to fix this in the future - Apple does have a facility for linux VMs to use Rosetta 2 internally coming in Ventura.
Didn’t Intuit want to use the original Rosetta for Quicken Mac to run on Intel machines but Apple wouldn’t approve it?
 
I thought VMWare said that they couldn’t support Windows because of licensing issues- does this mean that Microsoft is supporting this now?
You have to join the Windows Insider program to download it.

Maybe they consider that a developer and that is the work around from a legal aspect.

I downloaded the Win ARM. have not install yet
 
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is by far my favourite Linux distribution. I'm tempted to get Parallels to last me until the official release of VMWare Fusion Pro.

I do need to be able to use Linux for some of my work.
 
Nah keep this unresolved. Stop using Ubuntu. That entire distro is bloatware and a shell of it's former self. There's better ARM Linux distros you can be using. Use Arch, Fedora, or Asahi instead. Asahi especially is specialty built for Apple chips.
For M1 maybe, but I'm not messing with any non-Ubuntu Linux on x86 anymore. I don't care what advantages there are to Arch, it's not worth having to use niche community-supported packages for all the mainstream software like Docker.
 
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