I have found that the easiest way to run many apps on a Mac is CrossOver for Mac. It’s built on the Wine codebase, but is a much easier and friendly way of installing Windows apps in virtual “bottles” on a Mac. They actively fund the Wine community.
It’s funny that most Mac users don’t seem to know about it. There doesn’t seem to be much need to buy Parallels and have a heavy overload on your system if most of the apps you want work fine here.
You can try and give it a spin. Here are the applications that are strongly supported, however, you could probably be lucky if you use any other software as well (Yes, many games are supported).
That seems to be pretty cool. I have used wine on linux for installing some games (it sucks that game vendors don’t have linux versions). Have had reasonable success with it although the emulator engine has not been perfected yet. I was able to run quake 3 with success although you have to tweak the settings. But the emulator engine is surprisingly low on consuming resources. Imagine I had a celeron D with 256 meg 😉
BTW, I am not sure if Wine is GPL3 or not. I guess it’s not as Cross Over (not open source) is using the codebase. Just checked it’s LGPL 2.1. As long as they are funding the wine project i’m game.
I didn’t write this. Somebody else did from my account as a joke. Please delete it. Thanks.