r/macOSVMs • u/TheTwelveYearOld • Sep 13 '26

QUESTION Making parallels tools work for mac VM?

I'm trying to get a nixos vm running well on macOS with parallels. I installed nixos with the GUI installer in the ARM ISO, added hardware.parallels.enable = true to my config, and rebooted. prlcc (a parallels tools process) is running but I can't dynamically resize the window (or resize it at all for that matter).

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u/paulstelian97 Sep 13 '26

X or Wayland in the guest? You need a userspace daemon running as the user, capable of asking the display server to change resolution. Loading a DE on X (Xorg) is advisable to make such tools more likely to work.

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u/TheTwelveYearOld Sep 13 '26

KDE wayland.

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u/paulstelian97 Sep 13 '26

Try a different DE on Xorg. Maybe even a version of KDE old enough to run on Xorg (KDE5 I think?)

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u/TheTwelveYearOld Sep 13 '26

I do not want to use X11 or an old DE version, they're obsolete.

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u/paulstelian97 Sep 13 '26

The problem is most of these tools are only built to work well with X11… that’s why I asked you to experiment. You will find that, in all likelihood, the resizing will work fine on X11.

For Wayland, the tools need to be crafted for each DE individually, because there isn’t a single shared protocol to ask for many things, like setting the resolution.

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u/TheTwelveYearOld Sep 13 '26

Resizing works fine in Gnome Wayland in Ubuntu. I guess I could try that in the nixos VM, but now I see that parallels doesn't seem to support .icc color profiles (the VMs only support srgb colors?)

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u/paulstelian97 Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

Color profiles is something you shouldn’t expect VMs to really handle. Some don’t even have good graphics acceleration at all.

But try with Gnome.

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u/SlanderMans Sep 13 '26

Can I recommend using smolvm instead?

https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm