I used the free VMWare Fusion yesterday on a 2017 MacBook Pro and it worked very well.
The reason I did this is for two reasons. One I wanted to know the performance of Fusion on older Mac devices. Was it a resource hog or did it use a minimum of resources to do its job? I am pleased to report that it worked very well. The Mac only had 8 GB of RAM and it installed Linux Mint quickly and it was responsive when I was using it. It was amazing. I expected some sort of lag because the memory was divided into 4 GB for Mac, and 4 GB for Linux mint. No lag that I could determine. It felt like it was natively installed.
To test it I watched videos on YouTube and browsed the web. I found it responsive and surprising. I did a fast.com test and the speed in Linux for fast.com was faster than the speed on the Mac for fast.com. Now of course this is probably due to several factors. The randomness of the speed test, and the quality of the connection, but I didn’t feel things were slower on the internet in Fusion in Linux Mint. This is remarkable to me.
To compare I used Parallels on the same machine two years ago with Windows 10. It was necessary for a project for my friend to use Windows. I spent $150 on that program and on getting a Windows 10 license. Windows 10 was slow on that computer. She had to use Microsoft Project which just was terrible on that computer. It worked but it was painfully slow. In comparison after installing Linux Mint, everything was snappy including a Linux game that I downloaded to test it—playing a game in a VM environment with 4GB of RAM. That was amazing to me.
Do I blame Parallels or Windows 10? I blame Windows 10 more. It wants 16GB of RAM, and vendors who have shipped less than 16GB on systems for the last 10 years have been cheap and counterproductive. I’m looking at you Windows/Apple. My main gaming PC that I use LM daily has 32GB of RAM and it flies. It is faster than Windows in everything. Faster browsing the local file system. Faster using Brave on the internet. Faster editing of PDF/Word files.
On this webpage, we talk a lot about what is helpful. I have always enjoyed using things like Fusion that allow you to run multiple OS on a computer. It makes it easier and more accessible for the average person and I personally just love seeing other OS run under my main OS. I wish OS cooperated more and could dynamically share the hardware natively instead of needing a program like this, but I understand why that could be a problem. Until OS plays together better, programs like Fusion/Parallels/Virtualbox remain a constant tool for help.