6 ms·

Fusion is free now for personal use.

e40 5y ago
Interesting. I wonder if this is because it has really sucked in the last 6 months and this is some sort of hail mary? I have 2 machines with the latest VMware Fusion on it. An iMac (Intel) and a Mac Pro (2013). Both ran all versions of macOS flawlessly until a few months ago. Big Sur and Monterey have massive issues. I couldn't install from scratch anything Monterey. I had random hangs, installing new macOS guests. Just so many issues. It forced me to try Parallels Pro and I found it works fine. I'm in the process of switching over.
- WesternEdge 5y ago
  I wonder if Fusion was ever even profitable. I have never met anyone who has independently gone and purchased it. But I've bought licenses for it through work and maybe enough others have too. Maybe it's a loss leader product now, get individuals into it so that they will ask for it at work.
  - rleigh 5y ago
    I (grudgingly) paid for personal copies of both Fusion and Workstation Pro, since I did use both heavily for years. However... my personal opinion of Workstation has taken a nosedive. I've experienced quite a number of really ridiculous bugs, and it appears that the firing of all of the competent maintainers and replacing them with Chinese developers has not done the product quality any favours. Looks like it's been in "cash cow maintenance mode" for almost a decade at this point. Example from last week at work: When I fire up my Linux VMs on Windows 10 Enterprise, I get a black screen. The workaround: enable a nonexistent floppy drive. When the system boots the "floppy drive not present" dialogue box somehow stops the screen blanking out and it works until the virtualised OS power saving turns off the screen. At which point it's dead until you power it down and repeat the floppy trick. There's some really basic bug here, and it's been around for several years. Reported and unaddressed. Same with quite a few other issues I've reported. EFI bugs preventing FreeBSD booting. Segfaults when using the PC beeper on Linux. Really stupid stuff that any basic emulation should be handling. The QA on these products seems to have just gone, and I really resent paying a significant amount of money for bug-ridden poorly-tested software. With Fusion I've seen the same issues that Workstation has for the most part, since other than the UI the codebase is mostly shared. If they want to be able to compete with the OS-provided and free alternatives, they need to up their game and make their product worth paying money for. Right now, it seems like you pay through the nose for something that has a handful of features nothing else offers, but overall is a worse experience.

e40 5y ago

Interesting. I wonder if this is because it has really sucked in the last 6 months and this is some sort of hail mary? I have 2 machines with the latest VMware Fusion on it. An iMac (Intel) and a Mac Pro (2013). Both ran all versions of macOS flawlessly until a few months ago. Big Sur and Monterey have massive issues. I couldn't install from scratch anything Monterey. I had random hangs, installing new macOS guests. Just so many issues. It forced me to try Parallels Pro and I found it works fine. I'm in the process of switching over.

WesternEdge 5y ago
I wonder if Fusion was ever even profitable. I have never met anyone who has independently gone and purchased it. But I've bought licenses for it through work and maybe enough others have too. Maybe it's a loss leader product now, get individuals into it so that they will ask for it at work.
- rleigh 5y ago
  I (grudgingly) paid for personal copies of both Fusion and Workstation Pro, since I did use both heavily for years. However... my personal opinion of Workstation has taken a nosedive. I've experienced quite a number of really ridiculous bugs, and it appears that the firing of all of the competent maintainers and replacing them with Chinese developers has not done the product quality any favours. Looks like it's been in "cash cow maintenance mode" for almost a decade at this point. Example from last week at work: When I fire up my Linux VMs on Windows 10 Enterprise, I get a black screen. The workaround: enable a nonexistent floppy drive. When the system boots the "floppy drive not present" dialogue box somehow stops the screen blanking out and it works until the virtualised OS power saving turns off the screen. At which point it's dead until you power it down and repeat the floppy trick. There's some really basic bug here, and it's been around for several years. Reported and unaddressed. Same with quite a few other issues I've reported. EFI bugs preventing FreeBSD booting. Segfaults when using the PC beeper on Linux. Really stupid stuff that any basic emulation should be handling. The QA on these products seems to have just gone, and I really resent paying a significant amount of money for bug-ridden poorly-tested software. With Fusion I've seen the same issues that Workstation has for the most part, since other than the UI the codebase is mostly shared. If they want to be able to compete with the OS-provided and free alternatives, they need to up their game and make their product worth paying money for. Right now, it seems like you pay through the nose for something that has a handful of features nothing else offers, but overall is a worse experience.