As mentioned before, in Ubuntu 16.04.1 VMware Player works as it always has worked.
Other tests, on the same computer, mentioned above:
- Linux Mint 20.1. No surprise there, it doesn't work since Mint is based on Ubuntu
- Fedora 33 (latest). It does work as it should for a Win7 VM.
- Fedora 33. With Win10 VM, it seems to work, but at some point hangs the entire computer, not just VM. This may have to do with "memory management", which is mentioned elsewhere for Win10. Also VM-computer BIOS has one more option with the case of Win10. This may be a some kind of a configuration issue.
So, there seems to be something very wrong with VMware Player on Linux. It may be hardware specific, details are presented above in length, or kernel specific or Ubuntu specific. I would have expected that testing of VMware Player/Workstation, involves a fresh Ubuntu install with patches and explicit confirmation where it did work. I have now done 4 different fresh installs for verification. The solution may be a simple prerequisite or configuration issue, which just isn't documented anywhere. With Ubuntu 16.04 and before, there was nothing specific that should have been noted - it worked as expected.
