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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

I ran into this at work with virtual box. Upgrade to Monterey helpfully tells you that a lot of your apps aren't going to work, after you have upgraded. Then anything using those system extensions fails every few days without explanation so you have to reinstall everything and push the car up the hill again.

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> Upgrade to Monterey helpfully tells you that a lot of your apps aren't going to work, after you have upgraded.

I stopped using the word "upgrade" in reference to Apple's updates a long time ago.

From user point of view, removing support for kernel extensions is definitely a win, since it means more stable (and secure) system.

IME kernel extensions (kexts) were definitely related to various kernel panics that I've seen in the past.

In most cases, alternative APIs have been present for quite some time, it's just that some software hasn't been upgraded yet. Deprecation started a few years ago, so it's nothing surprising really.

Similar VPN and virtualization apps work without kexts, so I assume both Tunnelblick and VirtualBox could be rewritten to take the leverage of the new APIs.

VirtualBox is x86-64 only, I doubt they will invest time in updating anything for macos considering apple's decision to move everything and everyone to arm

>From user point of view, removing support for kernel extensions is definitely a win, since it means more stable (and secure) system.

At that point just use an iPhone/iPad. The whole point of OSX is that you have enough control over the machine that you can be productive.

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