 I have a Mac. If I want to test something on the kind of Windows machine that developers who use Windows would use (so I guess Windows 11 and not Windows Server?) what are my best options for doing that? Any good online providers where I can spend a few dollars on the ability to remote-desktop into a Windows machine? I tried using Azure for this earlier and got to the bit with this checkbox and noped right out of there: 22 comments
I've been trying to figure things out by SSHing into a "windows-latest" runner in GitHub Actions, but I think that's running a highly customized Windows Server instance which probably isn't a good reflection of what a regular developer would be using on their own machine  @slightlyoff oh that's different from "Azure Virtual Machines", this might be what I want! Not sure why it thinks I'm called "allison", or what a "host pool" is @slightlyoff I think I'm too much of a coward to risk clicking through this thing, I'm going to dig out an external SSD and try VirtualBox locally instead! @simon AVD is the "right" answer, AFAICT. It's what we (Edge) use for remote development and fast bring-up for new Chromium/Edgium instances, and the machines can be super beefy if you need that. No idea what the admin/acquisition story is like, but it's a cromulent answer if it meets your needs. @simon @slightlyoff UTM, which is based on qemu, may be a smoother experience than VirtualBox at this point. @simon You are correct (in that Windows Server is rarely used on developer machines, and GitHub runners have a ton of nonstandard stuff installed)  @simon if it wasn’t for the disk space issue, would this help? https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virtual-machines/ Microsoft makes Win11 images available for testing purposes—VirtualBox and VMWare etc. @simon Do you perchance have an external USB 3.2 gen 2 drive? Like a Samsung T7 SSD with USB-C? Those runs almost as fast as internal storage so you can install Fusion (now free) and put Windows on that drive. @simon I have an Intel Mini 2019 that I run Plex on and have 2 5TB platter drives attached for the media libraries and transfer speeds a very fast. I use T7s for backups and those are even faster.  @simon google cloud windows vms have pay as you go licencing. AWS too. I thought Azure did too, but been a while since I provisioned a VM in the UI there. Buuut… they’ll be server, not desktop editions. I’d try QEMU or parallels, myself. @simon Maybe this? https://www.paperspace.com/core Or if that's a bit pricy for lengthy sessions, possibly: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/business/compare-plans-pricing @simon If you’re going to want it for a year or longer, it’s probably better in terms of bang for buck to buy a used HP or Dell mini. I got an HP Elitedesk mini G5 (i5-9500, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD) for $150, including a Win10/11 Pro key stored in UEFI. No monthly fees or emulation headaches. @simon BrowserStack , basically it is OS and/or browser on a cloud mainly used for testing. Not sure how much you can install it though... and quite pricey. @simon you could try a Windows 365 Cloud PC which corporations definitely do use but they are idealized and cleaned up Windows images. I do use Windows 11 on VMWare Fusion for building projects for Windows with Visual Studio but you will get the ARM version that almost nobody uses outside of that scenario. I also have an Intel Mac with VMWare but I rarely need to fall back to that for my use case.  |
Gregory's Server
I'm hoping to avoid running VMWare Fusion or Parallels or similar on my laptop because I'm a bit low on disk space at the moment