Installing VMWare Workstation on Linux

I’ve been using VirtualBox for a long time now because it’s free and I’m cheap. VMWare has always been the preferred option but their free version (VMWare Player) was a bit limited. Not that VirtualBox doesn’t have its flaws as well mind.

Anyway, apparently Broadcom recently made their ‘full fat’ version available for free as well. Whether this will remain the case or not remains to be seen, but for now, I’ve moved over to using VMWare Workstation.

Here’s the installation instructions. I’ve tested this on Debian 13.4 and on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. YMMV but it seems pretty likely this will work on pretty much any reasonably modern distro.

1. Login or create an account at Broadcom’s Support Portal
2. Download from their Product Downloads page
3. The Linux version of VMWare Workstation Pro comes as a .bundle file which you can install with sudo sh ./<filename>.bundle

That’s it. Pretty painless and straightforward.