Happy with WS 11.1.2 - won't upgrade to WS 12 Pro

[mfelker]

I am happy with WS 11 and won't upgrade to 12.  This is because I've found an excellent distro - openSUSE 42.1 (aka Leaf) which both kernel 4.1 (LTS) and gcc 4.8.  I dual boot with no problem and can develop on both OS.  I will make backups of the VM's I'm working on in hidden Linux Partition and a Windows partition.  Best of both worlds (except Windows 10 is more of a toy distro!)

One other reason is simply cost.  An upgrade to the next release used to cost $99.  Then it went to $119.  Now it is $149.  VMware is being penny wise and pound foolish because upgrade sales of WS 12 have got to have gone down.  Regardless I am not a shareholder in VMware or EMC so I don't care.

[NoelC1]

Right there with ya.

I've bought every version since 6.0 I think.  Maybe 7.0.  12 doesn't light my fire enough to pay half again what an upgrade should cost, especially since version 11 lasted only 3/4 the time.

I know the value of keeping current from experience.  Whatever marketeer decided the price needed to be higher and the release time shorter simply overestimated that value.

-Noel

[mfelker]

I actually go back to ver 1.00 (1999). I still have that disk!  So marketing put out that it could be installed on Widnows NT and Windows 2000 - which I did.  Also some linux distro using kernel 2.2.  Didn’t  use Linux then so I'm not sure.  I must admit that I got 2 licenses for free from Global Sales (including WS 11) because I escalated ordering problems from the store.  Don't expect that would happen today but VMware  Web IT staff is woefully inadequate.  The vSphere 6 Web interface actually requires Flash (gasp). 

Meanwhile Unity still runs fine under openSUSE Leap.   I have 3 VMs running at the moment including a virtualized ESXi 6 server (At least this is free for all) For the most part upgrades after ver 7.x have been regressions and abandonment of features.    So sad

[NoelC1]

Not to mention failures to fix reported problems...

To hide the system tray icon, which is normally impossible due to a corrupted registry key:

1.  Export the following VMware, Inc. key to a .reg file.

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.]

2.  Delete the above key from the registry.

3.  Re-import the .reg file by double-clicking it.

4.  Create a VMware Tray subkey, then add the value TrayBehavior to it, with DWORD value 2.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.\Running VM List]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tray]
"TrayBehavior"=dword:00000002

See also:  https://communities.vmware.com/thread/477007

I hope VMware Marketing is listening.  They're still in business because of folks like us.

-Noel

[NoelC1]

I stand corrected.  They apparently DID fix this one.  However, it never stood out to me when I looked for it in the release notes.  Since it's pretty much the ONLY problem I've seen with Workstation 11 it might even have slightly influenced my decision whether to upgrade, though on reflection it's still not worth $150 to have a bug fixed that has an easy one-time workaround.

-Noel