I bought Parallels 17 to run Linux VMs on my M1 Mac. I installed (from the ISO) Debian 11 Linux with XFCE4 in a VM, and ran into a few issues. These issues do not occur on my x86_64 laptop running the same exact same software natively, so I doubt it's a problem with the distro. I also tried Fedora 34 (installed from ISO), and ran into the same problems. 1) two finger scrolling on my Magic Trackpad is accelerated so much it's completely unusable. Moving my fingers a fraction of an inch scrolls like 100-200 lines down/up the page. After much experimentation, I was finally able to work around this by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-prlmouse.conf and commenting out the 6 line InputClass section to disable the Parallel Tools prlmouse X11 driver, and rebooting. The default X11 mouse driver seems to work just fine, so I'm not even sure what benefits the Parallels Tools prlmouse driver is supposed to provide. To reproduce, install Debian 11 (or Fedora 34) with XFCE, install Parallel tools, reboot, login, fire up the Firefox browser, and go to any website that has a really long page, or uses infinite scroll, such as Reddit or Twitter. Then try to scroll only 10 lines down or up. 2) While trying to solve #1, the scrolling speed problem, I tried edit the VMs settings mouse/touchpad section. There is a menu in there where I am permitted to change the mouse from "Optimize for gaming", "Don't optimize for gaming", and "auto-select". If I pick "optimize for gaming", then when I power on the VM, I get a popup complaining that I don't have "smart mouse" enabled. It encourages me to edit the settings again, visit the options tab, and look under some option that doesn't actually appear to exist on my system. Not sure what the smart mouse feature is, I suspect it's only relevant to Windows, making the popup message misleading and meaningless. 3) Closing applications doesn't remove the right most entry on the top panel. With XFCE, like Gnome, at the top of the screen is a panel that contains a bunch of things, including a button for each running application. But when I close any application, the right most button doesn't get replaced by a blank space. It's not a button anymore, and if I open any other application, the "ghost button" gets replaced by the new app's button, but it looks to me like something is wrong in the video driver. Like I said, this doesn't happen on my HP laptop running the same version of Debian 11 with XFCE natively. 4) I like to resize my Linux VM window into a sort of "portait mode" (taller rather than wider), so it takes up most of the right half of my 4K UHD monitor. Every time I boot up my VM, the VM's window either a) becomes the tiny size of a 1024x768 window but X11 seems to think it's still at the large resolution I had when I shutdown, so everything appears all squished together, or b) the window re-opens at the same resolution I had at the last shutdown, but X11 seems to think it's actually running at the 1024x768 resolution, so everything appears all stretched out. In either case, all I have to do is resize the window again, and that fixes the resolution problem. It would be great if Parallels could consistently remember the previous window size and pass that resolution to the X11 video driver the same way it does whenever I resize the window. Hopefully these are all just "teething problems" with the new version, and everything works better in the next update.
I also took the opportunity to install Debian 11 and Fedora 34 with all the various GUI window managers, but couldn't get either KDE or LxQt to work at all. The OS and software install normally, but the VM hangs during the first reboot, when they reach the point where they try to start the Simple Desktop Display Manager. You get no login prompt, no X11 gui at all. Both distros with Gnome, XFCE, LXDE, MATE or Cinnamon all use some other display manager and boot up just fine.
