VMware Fusion Pro: Now available free for personal use

Post by doublerabbit » Tue, May 14, 2024, 6:19 PM UTC

gorkish wrote: post #22

mickelsen wrote: post #3

Given that this is owned Broadcom now, and they are going all in with squeezing every last drop from ESXi and similar offerings, I wonder what's gonna happen with Fusion in the future; while now you only pay for commercial usage, maybe they are going to let it rot over the years until it's no longer cutting edge software? Would they keep it as a loss-leader?

If you want to virtualize something with good performance on desktop windows you use Hyper-V; if you want to do it on mac you use Apple's Virtualization Framework; if you want to do it on Linux you use KVM. Desktop virtualization products used to bring the secret sauce with them; now that every OS ships with a well-integrated and well supported type 1 hypervisor they have lost much of the reason for existing. There's…

Post by nxobject » Tue, May 14, 2024, 6:22 PM UTC

whalesalad wrote: post #55

raybb wrote: post #43

What timing. Literally yesterday I was trying to set this up on my Mac and went with UTM instead. It worked excellently for getting Kali Linux up and doing a WLAN USB passthrough.

Fortunately the open-source VM space is the best it has ever been these days. No reason at all to use proprietary crap anymore.

Post by reanimus » Tue, May 14, 2024, 6:26 PM UTC

xxpor wrote: post #56

zten wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, if you care about 3D acceleration on a Windows guest and aren't doing pcie passthrough, then KVM sure isn't going to do it. There is a driver in the works, but it's not there yet. edit: I made a mistake and got confused in my head with qemu and the lack of paravirtualized support. (It does have a PV 3D linux driver, though)

Do any of the commercial hypervisors do that today?

Post by thesnide » Tue, May 14, 2024, 6:28 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #53

bombcar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they knew (and to be fair, probably correct) that a decent number of small businesses (and maybe even larger ones) were using ESXi and they just decided to shut that down in a push to get more licenses. If my theory is correct, in about two years (if they haven't killed it entirely by the) they'll introduce a "free for homelab use" variant - maybe. But Workstation and Fusion were more used by personal peopl…

Not just not worth the hassle. The product being free now means that if someone files a bug report or request for enhancement, they can more easily just shrug and say "won't fix."

Post by bombcar » Tue, May 14, 2024, 6:28 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #64

bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion became basically worthless when you couldn't easily run Intel Windows on a Mac anymore because the underlying processor changed.

Can’t even run x86 Linux on Mac right now