After endless PR blunders, they're trying to lure back customers probably with a spam platform or freemium nonsense. Nope, they shat the bed and now they have to sleep in it.
Workstation Pro/Fusion Pro were made free for personal users in May: <a href="https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2024/05/vmware-workstation-pro-now-available-free-for-personal-use.html" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2024/05/vmware-workstat...</a>
Literally a few days ago I was on their website trying to figure out how I could possibly get a commercial license just to test an OVA. Going through sales, convincing my manager to make a PO, and going through the expense reimbursement process is a lot of hoops to jump through just to test a virtual machine.
See also VMware Workstation Shifting from Proprietary Code to Using Upstream KVM (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013032">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42013032</a>) which I'm sure plays into this too ...<p>A while ago (like ~10 years ago) VMWare workstation, or some of the things virtualbox graphics drivers did, seemed to be the only reasonable ways to run a virtualised desktop with 3d or at more than 5fps. But these days virtio and spice seems to work just fine.
My number one choice for desktop hypervisor on Linux would be virtualbox, except that unity mode hasn’t worked in years and that’s my most needed feature.<p>It feels like a weird spot to be in that there’s a bunch of competing options and all of them have weirdness or broken features (no slight to the people building these - far be it from me to complain about free stuff).
VMware Workstation was my go to for "Desktop Linux", nowadays I use WSL, and most likely this is the main reason it is now free, before getting the axe eventually.