After the Broadcom takeover, the ‘Player’ versions of VMware are discontinued, and Workstation Pro is now ‘free for personal use’…

It has been updated to version 17.5.2, but the changes are all for security patches, and overall functionality is unchanged.

There has been some discussion as to whether this product is now ‘functionally stabilised’, with some commenting that they believed the ‘technology preview’ released back in 2023 was for 17.5.0 – a dot-release!    I am of the opinion that it was for version 18, and that this was cancelled, and the ‘17.5’ release was brought out to fix (not ideally…) the failure with Kernel 6.5…

More recently, there has been some delay in getting a fully-tested fix for vmnet – which fails to compile on Kernel 6.9, but a patchset is available here:  https://github.com/nan0desu/vmware-host-modules/tree/tmp/workstation-17.5.2-k6.9.1
I have installed this, and it seems to be working correctly (F40/KDE6/Plasma – Win10 Client)    There are still issues I have found with Wayland and KDE6 and the VMware UI, but thankfully there is still an option to install/use X11 on Fedora 40..

Robert Gadsdon.   May 23, 2024.