TLDR Version: Scrolling is unbearable with trackpad/touchpad in Windows 11 VM on M1 MacBook Air. Tried using drivers and every known setting (decent tech person here) to no avail. However, it works on UTM and Parallels just fine, so it's just VMware. Why?

Hey guys, as someone just looking to run a little occasional Windows on my new M1 MBA, I looked at a few VM softwares. Parallels was best but way too expensive, UTM worked well but had bad animation stutter, and then I came to here. VMware Fusion 13 is perfect for my needs, with great visuals, great animations, all the basics, except one: Trackpad/Touchpad scrolling.

I simply cannot tolerate scrolling with the built-in MacBook Air trackpad. Do note, it does work, but it is so jittery and sped up that it might as well not. I'll gently scroll up or down for a second, and the entire page will stutter up and down repeatedly, taking seconds before it finally scrolls down "normally" (assuming it does). At first I attributed this to a lack of drivers for the Mac, but then the same occurred with my Magic Trackpad, meanwhile a normal mouse works just fine.

I've tried adjusting almost every setting in macOS, from toggling reverse scrolling to changing trackpad scroll speeds, adjusting the various pointer and other trackpad settings, and looking around in VMware's settings - all to no avail. I then tried looking in Windows in the VM, and it doesn't even detect a trackpad so I can't adjust anything except scroll speed, which doesn't change anything! Of course, I looked for Magic Trackpad drivers and all in the Windows VM, but softwares there either don't support ARM or didn't work at all. Even installing a Magic Trackpad driver from an Apple Boot Camp archive did nothing (while it DID fix that issue when I once used said trackpad on a Windows laptop, so it's the VM).

All of this would be fine and I would assume something isn't passing to the VM because they can't, but that's not the case - both UTM and Parallels scroll with the trackpad without issue, it's just VMware.

My last resorts were to add two lines of code from someone reporting a similar issue on Ubuntu about enabling reverse scrolling in the registry and the VM file itself, and neither worked at all. After that, I tried installing UTM's Spice tools and Parallels's Guest Tools, which of course didn't work. Could someone please help or at least explain why VMware is the only VM software that can't recognize a simple trackpad?