Screenshots with GPU-enabled mode were black. There were so many showstopping bugs that I just gave up trying to include it in our benchmark comparison. If you value polish and the extra stuff in an application to make usability a joy and not just “it'll do,' then VirtualBox isn't for you.īeyond the simple “I don't care for it' things, it's not ready for use with a Mavericks host or Windows 8.1, either. The interface feels very un-Mac like, with widgets and text that are obviously ported, a lack of Mountain Lion full-screen mode support, key remapping of Control-C to Command-C, etc.

Sharing between the host Mac is not ideal, as you can't disable the network connection without disabling sharing. There is no auto-setup for client VMs, and you have to enable a lot of things like clipboard sharing that should be on by default. (And the latter option has to be done from the command line.) The Windows disk size default is a more reasonable 25GB. For example, the default Linux disk size of 8GB is too small to install some configurations, but it's only after you get into the installation portion that you realize this and have to restart the VM creation process or shut down and resize your disk partition. Otherwise, there are just too many things that lack finish in VirtualBox, and these can waste your time. This may be because the software is not oriented toward the same consumer market as the other programs, so it exposes controls to things that some IT managers would like but most people wouldn't want to be exposed to, like the virtual disk format. The interface and options can be confusing compared to Parallels and VMware-it's not immediately clear how you attach ISO storage to virtual DVD drives, and there's a lot of digging through options that seems unnecessary. But if you are considering it as an alternative to Parallels Desktop or VMware, you should know that it's not really in the same league from a usability standpoint. I have reviewed VirtualBox in the past, and many users swear by it for the simple reason that it's free and it works for many people's basic needs. Compared to the Free VirtualBox Virtualization Program

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. VMware and Parallels may not like the idea of having to write OpenGL driver support for a scarcely virtualized OS, but they will need to if they want to get proper functionality for the applications.

Since Apple has been shipping decent GPUs in its hardware for many years now, it's generally assumed that if you can run Mavericks, you have a GPU with OpenGL support.

Virtualbox vs vmware fusion performance