I’ve been using VMware Player (free version) for a while now and it’s been working fine. Recently I switched to Wayland and VMware’s grab input behavior broke. The guest gets most keys correctly but Alt and Super are intercepted by the host. Clicking on the vm also gives me a remote desktop popup on the host prompting to allow remote interaction which gives some weird results both on the host and guest. Apparently this is a known issue with gnome(?) and the only workaround is to add Super to any shortcut (eg. Super+Alt+Tab) but this obviously doesn’t work for all shortcuts.
I’m using Gnome on Fedora and Ubuntu and they seem to have the same behavior (but no remote desktop popup on Ubuntu). Both work fine on X11. I’ve also tested both VMware player 16 and 17.
So if anyone is using VMware on Wayland, do you know of a combination that works? Does it work on KDE? Should I just switch to Virtualbox? I’d really rather keep Wayland if possible.
If you install the virtio drivers KVM based virtualization it will work way better. You can even copy and paste
It can be done, to some extent, but it’s definitely not as easy as VMWare makes it. With Broadcom turning VMWare into shit I wish they’d just release the source code as AGPL and be done with it.
VMWare did something I’ve seen no other virtual machine software do: allow me to turn on Windows Aero on Windows 7 without registry hacks or PCIe passthrough.
The virtio tooling is amazing as an open source project, but when it comes to user experience, VMWare has always been better in my opinion. Still, I primarily run Linux VMs that don’t need guest tooling, so I use virt-manager, but every so often I wish VMWare Player were open source because of how smooth it is in comparison to free software.