Parallels Can Now Run X86 Windows And Linux On Apple Silicon Mac
How-To Geek, Tuesday, January 14th, 2025
Parallels Desktop, a popular application for running Windows and Linux virtual machines on Mac, can now run 64-bit x86 operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs. That means more versions of Windows and Linux can run on the latest M1, M2, M3, and M4 Mac computers.
Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, and other similar virtualization tools are only designed to run operating systems built on the same architecture as the host. When Mac computers used x86 Intel processors, a Mac could virtualize the regular PC versions of Windows and Linux (and many other operating systems) with a minimal performance hit. When Apple switched to the ARM-based Apple Silicon architecture with the first M1 Mac computers, virtualization was mostly limited to Windows 11 on ARM and some ARM Linux distributions.