On a fresh install of Ubuntu Desktop 20.04.04 (GNOME3) and VMware Player 16.2.3 in recent days, Player opens but selecting "Open a Virtual Machine," navigating to and selecting the machine's .vmx file, and either double-clicking it or clicking "Open" has no effect. Effectively, Player doesn't execute the .vmx file.
Nevertheless, navigating to, selecting, and double-clicking the .vmx file in Nautilus does execute the file and open the guest.
Otherwise:
- The guest machine's directory is a known-good copy from backup.
- Un-installing and re-installing Player (while keeping the configuration files) has no effect.
- VMware Player 16.2.3 was similarly installed on Ubuntu 20.04 (Server, with gdm, gnome-session, etc. added) before the hardware failure that necessitated the OS re-installation, and had no such difficulty.
