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.

  • HeyLow 🏳️‍⚧️
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    38 months ago

    Specifically for Windows vms without a GPU passed to it, VMware tends to do a way better job at least in my testing

    • Possibly linux
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      78 months ago

      If you install the virtio drivers KVM based virtualization it will work way better. You can even copy and paste

    • Avid Amoeba
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      8 months ago

      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.