Fix images rendering as entirely black in Parallels Desktop on M-Series Macs ARM64 aarch64

[jondkinney]

If you open an image from the file explorer and it opens an entirely black window instead of displaying properly, we need to fall back to software rendering in a virtualized environment.

1. Copy the system .desktop file to your local applications

   cp /usr/share/applications/imv.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

2. Edit it to use the software rendering flag

   sed -i 's/Exec=imv/Exec=env LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 imv/' ~/.local/share/applications/imv.desktop

3. Update the desktop database

   update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/

Note: if you plan to run imv from the terminal ever, you can add an alias to your ~/.bashrc to prefix the executable with the necessary environment variable to render with software.

# append to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc

alias imv='LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 imv'

[dinvlad]

This might be another good one to set - llvmpipe is supposed to be faster and might even be the default, but doesn’t hurt to set for good measure: