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.
Better question is who is using VMware at all. QEMU+virt-manager on top.
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.
https://virt-manager.org/
If you want simple, GNOME Boxes is hard to beat.
Virtual box is slow and requires kernel modules just like VMware. Seems easier to use something native.
It’s got really good hardware graphics acceleration.
So does KVM
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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
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+1 here, intel on laptop.
Yeah, that’s what I’m referring to. I’ve never successfully turned on hardware acceleration when running Windows guests, and I don’t think Gnome Boxes even exposes the option.
Specifically for Windows vms without a GPU passed to it, VMware tends to do a way better job at least in my testing
If you install the virtio drivers KVM based virtualization it will work way better. You can even copy and paste
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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.