With the public beta of macOS 14 Sonoma due for imminent release, you may be tempted to try it out. Here are tips to help you avoid disaster.
virtualisation
What if you’ve forgotten your Mac’s password, or the secondhand Mac you bought expects you to enter one, or its owner has died?
Lightweight VMs currently only support ANSI and not ISO keyboard layouts. For English, this makes little difference, but in other languages it’s a critical shortcoming.
So how can a VM of 119.6 GB fit in a 100 GB container? How sparse files can make VMs and disk images smaller on disk.
Although these VMs are fast and even support Rosetta 2, they do have significant disadvantages, as detailed here.
Four new and improved features for Monterey and Ventura hosts, and two even better ones for Sonoma, including autosizing of the virtual display.
There’s a great more to come in Sonoma: two major changes in virtualisation, iCloud, privacy, accessibility and more.
What’s the best option if you don’t have the luxury of running betas on a dedicated Mac? How to install and run them in a VM.
T2 and Apple silicon Macs always encrypt the Data volume in internal storage. So why bother with enabling FileVault? And can you do that on external bootable disks?
All you need to know about the sparse RAW disk images used inside lightweight VMs on Apple silicon Macs.
The Eclectic Light Company 