I'm excited to see Parallels 18 land. Parallels is such an important part of my work life and hobbies. Those of you who are already kicking the tires, have you found anything cool that warrants a call out? Have you spotted any bugs or changes you're uncertain about? On the whole, are you glad you upgraded right away, or is there any reason to wait for the first service update?
Seems nice and works quite solidly, except there appears to be an issue with Windows 10 and Windows 11 not allowing KB5012170 update to go through as seen in (https://forum.parallels.com/threads...-to-install-in-pdm-18-0-0.358137/#post-907384)
1. Cursor still disappears in Linux and Win11. In Linux, upon first booting, if you click inside a terminal window the cursor should change to an I-bar but just disappears. In Windows, upon first booting, when the login screen appears with the time, there's no cursor at all. In each case you have to use three fingers to move like you're minimizing the desktop slightly, then let it snap back in order for the cursor to appear. I assume this is something to do with Parallels' mouse cursor cache or interface resetting at the wrong time during the boot process. 2. Internet throughput seems very sluggish in Android and Windows. I've had several Android and Windows updates stop dead in the middle, presumably due to MTU and/or processing delay issues. Linux seems ok for some reason. 3. Seems that I'm still seeing Time Machine stuck in Preparing Backup... now almost forever. It actually may be worse than it was before. So whatever it's doing to access Time Machine's local backups or the control files associated with them (why it would do that is a mystery unless it's spying), it needs to just f'ing stop doing that. All of the VM files (.pvm) that I use are excluded from Time Machine backups - I do them manually, so you can cross that . Other things: 1. Have not fully tested USB, however USB access using an RTL-SDR software defined receiver under Linux appears to work on first blush. Have not tested under Win11 yet. 2. Likewise, the excessively random processing pauses in Win11 seems to have been fixed for the most part, but there appears to still be some reticent issues that kind of looks like processing delays, but might actually be something else entirely.
Regarding the Other Things: Tested USB access using an Airspy HF+ Discovery using SDRsharp software in Win11 and it seemed to work well. The reason why that's significant is that the constant processing delays used to make the audio choppy and the USB signal appear disjointed - none of that occurs any longer. So that's a good sign.
Regarding the Time Machine issue: Did not notice the eternal "Preparing Backup..." thing today. It may be possible that whatever Parallels was doing to or leaving in the local backups prior to the upgrade finally rotated out of the incremental backup queue. Before I get overly ecstatic about this development, I will have to see if this persists for a few more days to see if it's actually fixed.
