CrossOver works great if the software you’re looking to use on M1 Macs runs without any problems. Meanwhile, QEMU is free, but you need to have an understanding of how emulation works to create virtual disks and configure specific hardware. While Parallels Desktop seems like the most user-friendly option, it is a paid subscription. When you need to switch between two operating systems, you need a solution that is effective and works seamlessly. You can install QEMU with the Homebrew package manager by installing a package called “qemu”. Built into macOS, the software isnt run on virtualization technology. All you have to do is to create a virtual machine with an ARM processor type. Since QEMU is an emulator, you can run Windows on Mac M1. The difference between QEMU and Parallels Desktop is while QEMU is a machine emulator, Parallels Desktop allows seamless functioning of Windows and macOS apps by giving users more control and options. QEMU also enables emulation for user-level processes to allow applications compiled for one architecture to run on another. It can be used with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at close to native speeds. With this release, Windows is back on the Mac, but with a big caveat. QEMU uses dynamic binary translation to emulate the machine’s processor to run various operating systems. Parallels released a public beta test version of its M1-based software earlier this year. QEMU is a free open-source emulator and virtual machine software.

Windows vm on m1 mac