VMware Workstation Pro now has no cost for personal use

Lounge
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VMWare announced that they are no longer charging for Workstation Pro for personal use.

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How does it compare to KVM/QEMU these days?

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Very Nice.

Workstation still far superior.

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I use VMWare day in and day out. I also use KVM. But I like KVM over VMWare because I nearly noticed the difference between working on my host computer and my VM. But VMWare has an advantage over KVM if you want to play games without parsing a VGA. Or any application that requires VGA emulation. KVM virtio can’t do that.

2 Likes
5

It depends on your needs.

VMware:

  • Easier to configure
  • Performant out of the box with no tweaking
  • Snapshot functionality is simpler and more fully featured
  • It has an MDI-style interface which is useful if you have a lot of VMs you run at the same time
  • It can connect to VMware ESXi

QEMU/KVM:

  • Open source
  • With tweaking and proper config it can be highly performant
  • Available in the repos(VMware needs an AUR package)

IMO, if QEMU/KVM is working for you, no reason not to stick with it.

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I also use vmware workstation pro. I have been using it for a long time not to say i know everything about it but, it’s very easy to install, set up and use. Works very well on both my amd and Intel host.

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What is the AUR package you recommend installing the VMware WS Pro?

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vmware-workstation

1 Like
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I removed Qemu/Virt and installed vmware-workstation
I will give it a spin with a trial iso when I have some time