Copy/Paste Broken - Wayland

[Nick Peyton]

Copy and paste no longer work, and I've seen multiple reports linking this to Ubuntu's recent forced move to Wayland.

VMware Workstation Pro cannot receive pasted text even inside its own interface (for example when renaming a VM), which means the failure is not host to guest but a fundamental clipboard handling break in the VMware application itself under Wayland.

Is there a temporary workaround for this on Ubuntu 25.04?  For the record, I can copy from guest > host, but not from host > guest.

Pro 25H2

25.0.0.24995812

## Software Information:

- **Firmware Version:**                            1301

- **OS Name:**                                     Ubuntu 25.04

- **OS Build:**                                    (null)

- **OS Type:**                                     64-bit

- **GNOME Version:**                               48

- **Windowing System:**                            Wayland

- **Kernel Version:**                              Linux 6.14.0-36-generic

Kind regards,

Nick

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[richard612]

After your copy action and before your paste action... Click VMware Workstation's title bar once.

I have no idea why this works.  Changing your app focus to the VM wrapper somehow kicks the clipboard pipeline into gear.

I suspect this pathology is an artifact of VMware Workstation being a gtk3 app (still).

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[Nick Peyton]

That makes it slightly more tolerable because it flips the issue: instead of only copying guest to host, I can now only copy host to guest, which is marginally better since I do that more often.

After a reboot, it reverts to the original behaviour.

Note: Clicking the grey bar at the bottom, when the cursor changes to ☝, is what reversed the behaviour for me.

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[richard612]

That's strange.  I've never had a one-way clipboard.  It's been fine in both directions after clicking the titlebar.

When copying guest to host (or trying to) you get the same result with ctrl-c as when using "Copy" on the context menu?  My thought is ctrl-c is being intercepted by the host.  Maybe.  Any knobs in gnome-tweaks related to this?  

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[Nick Peyton]

I've got two-way clipboard again.  To paste from host > guest I doni't click anything.

I just hover the mouse over the thin status bar on the very bottom of the entire workstation pro window.  

When the cursor is hovered over that, it pastes from the host.  When I move the cursor, the guest pastes itself.

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[Himanshu Garg]

Hi Nick,

Can you please share the below details with us-

1) hostOS and guestOS and their versions.

2) Support bundle for WS.

3) vmtools log.

You can follow the below doc link to enable vmtools logs-
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/313512/enabling-debug-logging-for-vmware-tools.html

Thanks

Himanshu

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[Nick Peyton]

1. Host OS: Ubuntu 25.04
   Guest OSs: Windows 11 Home, Pro, Enterprise, and Windows Server 2022.

2. Support bundle attached.

3. Copy/paste is broken across VMware Workstation Pro itself, not just inside guests. For example, pasting text into the VM rename field often fails. This affects all VMs, not a single guest.

The workaround is extremely frustrating and unreliable. It often takes two or three attempts to work, and when it fails the paste instead goes into the guest, requiring me to manually select and delete it. As a result, I avoid copy/paste entirely unless absolutely necessary, such as when pasting long commands or scripts.

As a workaround only, I can sometimes paste by clicking inside the target field, then moving the mouse to the very bottom edge of the VMware Workstation window and pressing Ctrl+V. This appears to inject keystrokes rather than perform a true clipboard paste, similar to "paste clipboard as keystrokes" behaviour in tools like TeamViewer or Datto RMM.

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Attachment(s)

vm-2025-12-26.662086.tgz   11.22 MB 1 version

[Nick Peyton]

It may be unrelated, but this forum "Post" button also appears buggy. The page refreshed instead of submitting, and I had to retype this post.

1. Host OS: Ubuntu 25.04
   Guest OSs: Windows 11 Home, Pro, Enterprise, and Windows Server 2022.

2. Support bundle attached: (vm-2025-12-26.662086.tgz)

3. Copy/paste is broken across VMware Workstation Pro itself, not just inside guests. For example, pasting into the VM rename field often fails. This affects all my VMs.

The only workaround is unreliable and frustrating, often requiring multiple attempts. When it fails, the guest pastes itself forcing manual cleanup. As a result, I now avoid copy/paste unless absolutely necessary, such as for long commands or scripts.

Occasionally, pasting works by clicking the target field, moving the mouse to the very bottom edge of the Workstation window, and pressing Ctrl+V. This appears to inject keystrokes rather than perform a true clipboard paste.

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Attachment(s)

vm-2025-12-26.662086.tgz   11.22 MB 1 version

[Vinicius Marangoni]

I'll provide some details as I'm having the same problems of the others.
First, a disclaimer: all the text below was written by a human and all debugging attempts were tried manually, without any assistance of LLM tools. You can safely assume that no hallucinations are provided here.

Host: Arch Linux with Gnome (Wayland)
Guest: Ubuntu 20.04 with Gnome (Xorg)

Clipboard from Guest to Host: works normally. I write some text in Gedit (in guest), copy it with CTRL+c and as soon as I move the mouse to ouside the VM, the value is set into the clipboard and I can paste it normally with CTRL+v. I can see the value is set on the clipboard as soon as the mouse leaves the VM window because `vmware.log` (on Host) file demonstrates this with the following line:

```
2026-04-03T17:57:14.655Z -INFO vmware-vmx 19201 [ws@4413 threadName="vmx"] CPClipboard_SetItem: Set CPClipboard struct with data of size:7, format:1.
```

Clipboard from Host to Guest: doesn't work normally - it requires a workaround. If I copy a text (with CTRL+c) from gedit on the Host and try to paste (with CTRL+v) on the Guest, it doesnt work. The value that is pasted in Guest is the last value the the Guest itself copied to its clipboard, which means its clipboard is not overwritten. However, as others mentioned in this thread, there is a workaround to make the paste work from Host to Guest, and here's how: copy a value on the Host, click on the title of the VM window BUT DO NOT move your mouse cursor to inside the VM. Hold the mouse cursor on the VM window title and press CTRL+v. This will paste the value inside the Guest. If the window on focus inside the Guest is gedit, for example the paste will work. If the window on focus inside the VM is gnome-terminal, it will also paste normally (without requiring to paste with CTRL+SHIFT+v, which is what we normally do to paste no a terminal). But if you move the mouse cursor to inside the Guest (even after clicking on the title) and try to paste using CTRL+v inside the Guest, the value copied fom the Host will not be pasted, but instead, it will be pasted the last value that the Guest itself copied to the clipboard.

I apologize if I was too verbose / reduntant on the explanation above.

It seems to me that, instead of an agent inside the guest overwriting the value of the guest clipboard with the value copied from the host, the only way the clipboard works is by "artificially" injecting the clipboard value inside the guest. 

You will find attached the logs for both `vmsvc.log` and `vmtoolsd.root.log`. No `vmusr*` logs were produced (even though I specified it in tools.conf. Please note that these logs represent the time frame in which the following actions were performed:

1. Stopped the vm tools on guest: systemctl stop open-vm-tools
2. Edited the configuration file as specified by your guide: /etc/vmware-tools/tools.conf
3. Deleted the old logs from /tmp/
4. Started the vm tools on guest: systemctl start open-vm-tools
5. Tried to copy the string "From Host to Guest Normal" from Host to Guest with a normal behavior (trying to paste directly in gedit inside the guest) - The paste didn't work.
6. Tried to copy the string "From Host to Guest Workaround" with the workaround mentioned (click in VM window title, hold the mouse cursor on VM window title while gedit is on focus and pasted the contents - the paste works
7. Copy the string "From Guest to Host" from the guest gedit and paste it on the host - surprisingly I had to do this step like 4 times for it to work. The first tries have failed, but the final one worked
8. Stopped vm tools on guest: systemctl stop open-vm-tools

I would like to add some additional debugging steps I tried. After performing the steps mentioned above and collecting the logs, I started the service again and monitored both log files with `tail -f` to see if any log messages appear as soon as I copy a string value on the host, move the mouse cursor to inside the VM and try to paste it. If this behavior causes any exception, a log message should have been printed. The screenshot 001-tail-paste-normal-failed.png shows the logs while performing these steps. No relevant lines seems to appear. 

I did the same with `tail -f` but now performing the workaround strategy. With this strategy, the paste WORKS, but still no relevant logs are produced. The screenshot 002-tail-paste-workaround-ok.png shows this.

Even though I enabled debug level logs in tools.conf, maybe they will not have enough information to detect the root cause of this bug.

I hope with all this info you are able to reproduce the bug internally and provide a fix.

Best regards.

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Attachment(s)

vmtoolsd.root.log   4 KB 1 version

vmsvc.log   78 KB 1 version

[qhartman]

I was having past issues with 25.04 host and Windows 11 guests in VMware Workstation 25H2 (specifically 25.0.0.24995812). This morning I had a kernel update which required the kernel modules to be rebuilt, and now all my copy and paste features are working correctly. I'm running 6.17.0-7-generic. HTH.

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[marcel458]

We experience the same issues with 25H2 under Windows 11 Pro OS Build 26200.7462 host and Windows 11 VMs. That is why we went back to the previous version of Workstation and we are waiting for a fix.

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[Schnakel Kakel]

Same problem here. VMWare Workstation on Wayland copy/paste is broken. Since x11 is old, Broadcom should fix this.

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[Nick Peyton]

New version just released (25H2u1) and still can't copy from Linux host to any guest.

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[Patricio Mansilla]

Hello guys,
I'm using Ubuntu 25.10 with KDE and getting the same problem. For me, switching from wayland to X11 seems to solve the problem

Kind regards

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[qhartman]

Yeah, this is known to be an issue with VMware Workstation not properly supporting Wayland. X11 is just about dead in the ecosystem, so the problem is only going to get worse. Gnome 50 that released this week fully removes X11 support. X11 apps should still work through a compatibility layer they built, but I would expect that things that rely on deeper features (does clipboard access count?) won't start working if they don't work now.

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[Tim Harper]

Possible to get this functionality with some hacks.

GitHub - timcharper/clipboard-vmware-gnome: Provide clipboard synchronization between vmware and gnome desktop

Needs a little bit of elbow grease to get it running you just need to install the Rust build chain so you can run the daemon and then you have to launch the PowerShell script inside of the VM and you need to get the VM's IP address there's a little doctor script that you can run to check if the guest has access anyways, it works. AT-SPI events used to detect focus changes, gnome extension "Window Calls" used to get info about current focused window.

Tracks changes in Linux by hashing the clipboard.  Windows has a clipboard offset, so we track that to tell if the clipboard changed there.  Depending on focus or blur events, we automatically push or pull the clipboard. In my tests, it works pretty seamlessly.

GitHub		remove preview
GitHub - timcharper/clipboard-vmware-gnome: Provide clipboard synchronization between vmware and gnome desktop Provide clipboard synchronization between vmware and gnome desktop - timcharper/clipboard-vmware-gnome View this on GitHub >

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[altae]

Same thing here. On my system clipboard functionality stops working as soon as I login using Wayland.

VMWare Workstation 26H1 26.0.0.25388281

Host: Windows 11 25H2

Guest: Linux EndeavourOS with KDE PLasma Desktop

Right now I'm logging in using X11 to circumvent the issue. But KDE have announced that they will stop supporting X11 with KDE 6.8 which will be released in October 2026. This will leave me without clipboard functionality between host and guest. Please fix the issue as soon as possible.