VMware Tools do not exist for ARM Linux operating systems. They exist only for x86 Linux distributions and maintained only for really old Linux distros that haven't picked up open-vm-tools. Most of the ARM architecture distros have open-vm-tools. I don't know if there's any hooks in open-vm-tools for the gdb stub.
Ubuntu 22.10 isn't that bad a release if you got it installed on Apple Silicon (there are hoops you have to jump through because of Ubuntu kernel bugs in the released installers).
Unfortunately "paying the price for not working on older, stable versions" is unavoidable when running on arm64. Those "older stable versions" that work fine on x64 don't work well on arm64, if at all. That's because of things like a port of both open-vm-tools and VMware SVGA (vmwgfx) drivers to arm64, (both provided to the open source community by VMware) and outright bugs in arm64 kernels prior to 5.19.
As an example. Ubuntu 18.04 simply won't run on Fusion 13. Its device discovery doesn't understand the ARM SystemReady virtual platform provided by Fusion. Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04 and 22.10 work better (each release got better than its predecessors). They may take a bit to install at first, but the kernel updates they install are pretty solid and current. I anticipate that 23.04 will install out of the box without a lot of hassle (given what I've seen in the daily builds).
Red Hat releases aren't much better. RHEL 8/CentOS 8/Rocky 8/Oracle 8 for arm64 won't even run on Apple Silicon. That's fixed in RHEL 9/etc. and later.
- Paul (Technogeezer)
Editor of the Unofficial Fusion Companion Guides
