Keyboard gone haywire with Sonoma 14.4 (guest/host) and PD 19.3.0

This is ridiculous yet typical of Parallels support. They ask every man and his dog to send screenshots and technical data and crickets. Nothing has happened. This is still a serious issue that makes macOS Sonoma VM unusable. FFS gat off your collective behinds and proffer a solution. This issue was first reported at the beginning of March. And still nothing, it is still happening......

 

Really annoying isn't it!

 

I tried to post my solution in another thread and it didn't make it past the approval. I have an Apple Silicon Mac, so downloaded Virtual Buddy. It's made for running MacOS VMs and does not have any lag or keyboard issues. Just sayin'.

 

@BrianH2B,

Firstly, they keyboard issue is well known, with Parallels macOS VM with Sonoma and on intel.

Regardless, this looks interesting to the point of I will try it on my M1 MacBook Pro since Parallels is, well, useless. Can you advise whether Virtual Buddy does snapshots? As a developer\tester, that's the biggest gripe I have with Parallels on M1 running macOS VM (there are many others, including having to run ARM-based windows - there is no standard Dropbox client which I need, anyway rant mode off).

 

@BrianH2B,

OK I have installed VB and got a Sonoma Virtual Machine up and running. It is way better than I thought it would be. Clearly not perfect, but what a joy to use compared with the garbage that Parallels is trying to fob off on you WRT macOS VMs. No it doesn't do Windows VMs, but it really does macOS VMs very well.

It is excellent for what it is, very responsive, can suspend a VM AND you can save the current state. Whilst not quite a snapshot it's almost as good. What a great find. I will be doing more testing over the next week or so.

Perhaps the Parallels people might get in touch with VB and ask them how it's done.

 

But that doesn't help those of us in Intel.

 

Unfortunately, no and I'm there as well. I have an i9 iMac for Dev and Testing and Sonoma is terrible (to the point where it is unusable and I have reverted my test VMs to back Ventura).
But I had a big issue with Parallels on Silicon. Many are happy with ARM-Windows. My use case requires non-ARM windows and the ability to virtualise macOS successfully. Virtual Buddy doesn't help the Windows side, but is a great leap forward on the macOS virtualisation on silicon (and with Sonoma). The blurb Parallels puts out about their product on silicon is technically correct, but such a load of BS.
Again, I'm with you, Parallels should at least fix Sonoma (which is an unusable pile of crap with the keyboard issues) on intel even if they cannot get their act together on silicon.

 

The issue is still there with parallels V 20 believe it or not!

 

Just found out this bug myself, and after fiddling with all possible USB- and/or mouse-related settings, I tried turning off Configure > Hardware > USB & Bluetooth > Advanced > Enable USB 3.1. In my case, this helped: key repeat now works as expected (at least for now...)

 

Version 20.0.1 (55659), updated Parallels Tools, same problem

 

The problem is now gone for me!

I did read your post wrong, missed the "turning off". I can't be 100% sure as I also updated I did also upgrade to Parallels Desktop 20.1.0, but pretty sure that your suggestion was what fixed the problem, thanks!

Now my only problem is that I can't use my Yubikey inside the macOS guest. It woulds on the macOS host, and I can see that the key "works" inside a terminal on the macOS guest, it shows the text output, but Safari and Chrome doesn't react on the key. I guess they doesn't see the key as a real keyboard or something

 

I think it's the 20.1.0 update that has fixed it because everything is good here now.

 

This fixed it for me on Parallels 19 and macOS 14 and 15. Thanks!

 

Thanks guys, happy to help!

 

I have a macOS guest on Sequoia 15.2 and my host is Sequoia 15.1.1. I am not able to update the host to 15.2 at the moment, but wonder if this difference is contributing to the caps lock behavior issue.
I am on Version 20.1.3 (55743) of Parallels.

 

Interesting development: I ended up shutting down and starting my host machine (not just a reboot). I then methodically went through checking the caps lock behavior after each of the following:

1. Start the guest macOS (no apps running in the guest).
2. Start a VPN session in the guest.
3. Start using Chrome in the guest.
4. Start using iTem2 in the guest.

These are the typical applications and scenarios I leverage with the macOS guest. So far so good. If I can find a pattern where the caps lock starts misbehaving again, I'll report back here.