Solved: Linux Mint guest on Big Sur, Fusion 12 won't boot, Xorg crashes

[jmaha]

Just went through the forced upgrade to Fusion 12 after upgrading to Big Sur. Now my Linux Mint 19.2 guest OS won't boot. I've tried both hardware version 16 and the upgraded 18. I can ctrl+alt+f1 to get to a functional terminal screen, and /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows a crash right after initializing the VMWARE_CTRL extension:

(II) vmware(0): Initialized VMWARE_CTRL extension version 0.2
(EE)
(EE) Backtrace:
(EE) 0: /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg (xorg_backtrace+0.4d) [0x5651c5dacabd]
...

See screenshot for remainder of backtrace. I uninstalled VMWare guest extensions via the command line and rebooted, but to no avail. It's very frustrating to have a forced paid upgrade break a system like this. Any ideas how to work around this bug?

[jmaha · Accepted solution]

I was able to work around this issue by upgrading Linux Mint 19.2 to 19.3 from the command line (you can access a text terminal after Xorg crashes by pressing ctrl+alt+F1 and logging in with your username and password).

The instructions here allowed my VM to boot again: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=311267