VMWare Workstation 16/Linux Mint 20.1 question

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ThinkingMonkey

VMWare Workstation 16/Linux Mint 20.1 question

Post by ThinkingMonkey »

Hi all,

I'm having an odd problem with the guest OS, Linux Mint, corrupting or somehow interfering with the host OS while it's running.
By corrupting or interfering I mean that a program running in the host OS, Windows 10, will crash, freeze, or otherwise have undesirable behavior
while the guest OS, Linux Mint 20.1, is running inside a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation.

Specifically, Firefox will not work correctly and this is the most reproducible program that I have problems with. Other programs sometimes work right, sometimes not, but opening Firefox and playing a video (such as navigating to YouTube) will result in a Firefox crash every time if Linux Mint is running
in the virtual machine with the window minimized. To be clear, opening Firefox in Linux Mint while it's running works fine. Having Mint running in the
VM and opening Firefox in Windows 10 at the same time results in a complete crash of Firefox, especially if playing a video.

Having Mint running in a VM so that I can drop back and forth between Mint and Windows 10 is the whole point, and that is not possible at this time.

I know that this is a VMWare Workstation problem probably, but I have posted there with no helpful answers and also I have a total of 5 virtual machine
guests, MX Linux, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro, and Ubuntu, and none of them except Linux Mint cause the problem I described.
So Linux Mint is involved somehow even if it is chiefly a VMWare problem.

So my question is whether anyone else is running a similar setup to mine and having the same problem and if so, what is the problem and how did
you fix it? The problem really boils down to this: If Linux Mint is running in a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation, the host system is basically
unusable although 4 other distributions work with no problem whatsoever.

I'm not blaming Mint, rather I'm trying to find out what is going on.

Thank you for any assistance you may provide with this matter.


- VMWare Workstation 16 Pro v.16.1.0 build-17198959
- [Host] - Windows 10 Enterprise x64 Version 1909 (OS Build 18363.900), 16GB RAM, Intel Core i5 8265U (4 cores, 8 threads)
- [Guest] Linux Mint 20.1 x64 Cinnamon [All updates as of today, 25Jan2021), 8GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 threads per core, 25GB virtual disk, 2GB video RAM
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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