Christian and Alex have already beaten me to pointing out that the latest and greatest release of VMware Workstation is now out in the wild, but I’d still like to take a moment and congratulate their, and the rest of the team’s, efforts. I was essentially part-time on this release, with my focus on work that has yet to see the light of day, but which I hope to write about in the reasonably near future – so I have something of an outsider’s perspective on things (although, if the Linux guest multi-head support is annoying you, it’s probably my fault :-))
It was really challenging and I think they did a great job turning out a solid product. Many people have noted that work expands to consume available resources and that’s definitely true for us – as much as we grow the team, we’re also trying to do more – so the hard trade-offs of time vs. quality and features is always one that has to be made.
As Christian has noted, we’ve taken additional steps to provide better desktop integration, but there are still many opportunities left in this area as more cross-desktop standards emerge and the existing ones become actively implemented. Readers with long memories will remember when I bemoaned the lack of support for the autostart spec in GNOME – it went in with 2.14, so now it’s trivial to configure an application to start up at login in any of GNOME, XFCE or KDE. It may seem like a simple thing, but if you need to do it and the support isn’t there, it’s actually a really hard problem to solve in any vaguely sane way.
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