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.
virt-manager for the win!
I had to switch the computer where I needed VMware to an Xorg session. 🥹
Sadly that means the second screen not working properly
Better question is who is using VMware at all. QEMU+virt-manager on top.
Specifically for Windows vms without a GPU passed to it, VMware tends to do a way better job at least in my testing
Yeah, Windows on KVM without GPU acceleration is not ideal. Also setting up a VM with all the bells and whistles like a shared folder, USB, printing is still easier on VMware than virt-manager. I’ve recently switched all my Windows VMs from VMware to KVM/virt-manager.
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.
Honestly, I was forced to use it for a project and then just stuck with it for its simplicity
Why?
If you don’t need many features it’s easier to quickly set up and create a vm than VirtualBox. Well until now anyway. I haven’t tried the other alternatives mentioned here, they might be better in that aspect too.
Virtual box is slow and requires kernel modules just like VMware. Seems easier to use something native.
If you want simple, GNOME Boxes is hard to beat.
It’s got really good hardware graphics acceleration.
So does KVM
I’ve never gotten KVM video acceleration for a Windows guest to work on either Intel or Nvidia GPUs with any kind of easy tooling (virt-manager, Boxes). Closest I’ve come is using Intel vGPUs but those panic the host kernel after a short while.
I just flipped the toggle and it worked. This is probably a “your millage will vary” moment.
Additionally GPU acceleration has received a lot of love recently as there has been a push for Foss VDI
Switch to KVM based virtualization such as gnome boxes or virtual manager
This. It is free, and good.
What do you like about GNOME Boxes?
I’ve a very bad experience with GNOME boxes, both VMware and VirtualBox seem to outperform the thing and work better (drag and drop and resolution scaling, actual GPU acceleration).
It is simpler and runs as a local user
Is the year in the 2000’s?. No.
Nobody in the world that does this professionally uses VMware.
Sorry gotta disagree here. I know several people who use Workstation professionally. Even on Linux
I had the same issue and was unable to find a solution.
I’d say switch to
gnome-boxesorvirt-managerif possible - they don’t have this issue with Wayland and perform better than VMWare / Virtual Box anyway.Interesting, I didn’t know about virt-manager. I might try one of those, thanks for the suggestion.
