For the last hour or so, I tried to get VMware working on my Windows desktop. My Linux mint VM, which I had installed and worked perfectly fine for a long while (I’ve used VMs for the last 8 years or so), is unusable. VMware is extremely sluggish, so much so that keyboard input can lock and result in characters duplicating. Watching videos is impossible: the video itself barely moves, and the sound breaks down to sub-levels of slow motion.

Apparently, this is the result of a resent-ish Windows update (what a shock 😤) that changed how virtualization works. Long story short, if I understand this correctly, there is another layer of isolation that VMware needs to work through. VMware uses whatever MS introduced and not the VMware component, and that is what causes the issue.

So far, my attempts at fixing this failed. There are various places showing how to disable this feature (Hyper V), but nothing seems to work. As a matter of fact, I noticed some of the mentioned features were off already, so I tried to turn them on to see if it made a difference. Nothing. My VMs are still unusable.

I do have Linux installed directly on my desktop, but this means no Windows, which I still need for some games I play (World of Warships stopped working on Linux for me for some reason, and Diablo 4 is a no go on Linux for now).