Ubuntu eventually seemed to be able to run alright with the latest patches to vmare 17.

However, Debian is still not working and freezes much more aggressively than Ubuntu did. Here's what I've done as a stop-gap on Windows 11.

I have had excellent success with Microsoft's WSL2 platform however which comes with built-in support for the major distributions:

The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed. I was happy to see that VMWare could finally play nicely with the Microsoft Virtual Machine Platform. This may not get you all the way to what you need, but is free with Windows and it works. If you need the GUI, you could install an XWindows desktop option and use VcXsrv to accomplish that.  At least until VMWare finally gets its act together with respect to Linux distributions.

Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'.

NAME FRIENDLY NAME
Ubuntu Ubuntu
Debian Debian GNU/Linux
kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling
Ubuntu-18.04 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
OracleLinux_8_5 Oracle Linux 8.5
OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9
SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4
openSUSE-Leap-15.4 openSUSE Leap 15.4
openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed