VMware Fusion and Workstation Are Now Free for All Users(blogs.vmware.com) |
VMware Fusion and Workstation Are Now Free for All Users(blogs.vmware.com) |
I'll never install a VMware product again.
I still use both, but only for VMs on Mac and Windows, which is not how I normally run VMs. (That being KVM/QEMU on Linux.)
One group would be macOS users who want to virtualize ARM64.
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.
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).
(since so many people in this thread think this is the end of VMware)
It's actually pretty damning for Fusion that an hobbyist project can punch high enough to "compete" with professional software.
Except that it doesn't.
Last time I've tried to integrate it to the testing system of my company it didn't support snapshots, CLI interface couldn't be used through SSH without the GUI subsystem working, and sometimes UTM displayed crypting errors during VM startups.
Personally I use UTM at least once a week, and when it works then it works OK, but saying that it matches a commercial product in terms of functionality means that either someone hasn't really used UTM or Fusion, or has distorted imagination what should be required of a software product that should be used in a commercial setting.
For my needs, UTM is actually superior to Fusion because it supports emulation of other architectures as well as virtualization. This is really handy on Apple Silicon.
They can also kill someone's business, that depends on those products, or forbid them to use Play Store with similar outcome, even though Android development is mostly free.
I didn't feel like making a complete overview of the whole landscape, since this news is about VMware workstation in specific. Therefore any VMWare product in use by server hosts would in all likelihood not be VMWare Workstation/Fusion.
Please refrain from personal attacks on this forum, it's one of the last nice places on the Internet.
CFEngine2->3, SugarCRM, Mongo, Couchbase, any CA or IBM product