I'm running on a M1 Mac mini, macOS Sonoma 15.3.1 with Fusion 13.6.2. If Kali GNOME suddenly stopped working on your VM, then there's something else that's gone wrong.
> resizing is working in intel macs and also on windows
That's not entirely true. Auto-resize works on a variety of ARM Linux VMs as well. But not those with Xfce (and maybe other not-so-mainstream desktop environments).
I test a variety of Linux distributions on Fusion in support of the Unofficial Fusion on Apple Silicon Companion guide. Here's what my testing tells me works for automatic resolution change when the window size changes for the VM (this list is current for Fusion 13.6.2:
- Kali Linux (GNOME) 2024.4, 2025.1
- Fedora Workstation (GNOME) 40 41, rawhide
- Fedora KDE spin 41
- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE and GNOME), Leap (KDE) 15.6
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, 24.10
- Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2 (with VMware Tools 12.4.0 and later)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (GNOME) 9.x
- Debian 12 "Bookworm" (GNOME)
- CentOS 9 Stream (GNOME)
I've found that no distribution using Xfce such as Parrot, Kali (default), or Fedora's Xfce spin will reset the resolution on a Fusion ARM VM.
The current workaround for this issue that appears on Apple Silicon VMs with Xfce is to reset the resolution in the VM once you resize the window.
There's no "fix from VMware" because there's no clear evidence to show that it's a VMware problem (remember, GNOME and KDE have figured out how to do it on ARM). My opinion is that the VMware ARM virtual machine platform has changed some things and Xfce (and others) hasn't caught up.
I also just noticed that the Xfce developers have released experimental support for Wayland -- like everyone else, it looks like they're joining the Wayland club because X11/Xorg development is dormant. It will be interesting to see if this will change things in the future as their implementation matures.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
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Original Message:
Sent: Feb 25, 2025 03:56 PM
From: little things
Subject: Resizing issues on Vmware Fusion 13.6
My Setup: kali with GNOME, m1 mac, vmware fusion 13.6.2. The resizing as you said should work for GNOME but it stopped working for now.
There was a vmware update which i did, not exactly sure from which version as i had not updated for a long time. I do checked the issue about xfce, it does not work. Also I tried, kde with kalo, mate with parrot os, both of them also dont resize the vm.
From your testing, resizing is working in intel macs and also on windows. Is the problem solely for silicon macs then? There is no fix for this issue currently by vmware? or this issue is completely unrelated to vmware? And only current solution is to change the resolution in settings?
Thank You!!!
Original Message:
Sent: Feb 25, 2025 10:32 AM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: Resizing issues on Vmware Fusion 13.6
Another update.
An interesting finding. On Fusion running on Apple Silicon, I installed Kali with GNOME. It does change the resolution when the screen is resized. An investigation of the installed packages reveals a similar complement of X server packages compared to the standard Xfce desktop. The same packages that are missing from the Intel Kali installation are not found in the GNOME ARM Kali installation - yet the screen resize works on GNOME and not Xfce. So that throws my theory out the window about differing packages between the Intel and ARM being the source of the problem.
I also installed Kali on my Intel Mac running Fusion 13.5.2. Resizing changes resolution with the default Xfce desktop environment.
Conclusions so far:
The underlying screen resolution change functions do work on Linux ARM running under Fusion. But there's something different about what Xfce is doing (where it doesn't work) compared to what GNOME and KDE do (where it does work).
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- Paul (technogeezer)
Original Message:
Sent: Feb 24, 2025 10:36 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: Resizing issues on Vmware Fusion 13.6
Just an update on my experiments.
Resizing with the XFCE environment on VMware Workstation (on an Intel PC) works fine. I've built Kali on two Linux machines using VMware Workstation - one running 17.1 and one running 17.6.1. Both resize as expected.
I'm repeating my experiments on the only other non-ARM Mac system I have - an Intel Mac running Fusion 13.5.2 on macOS 12 Monterey. I'll keep you posted.
I double checked on ARM systems and found that there are some differences between Kali running on Intel and ARM. One glaring difference - the Intel platforms have a xserver-xorg-video-vmware package, while the ARM platforms do not. So there are some fundamental differences between the software available on the two platforms which may explain why it works on Intel but not on ARM.
By the way, the same window resizing issue exists on Fedora's xfce spin on ARM.
I'll also repeat this experiment on my Apple Silicon Mac with Kali running GNOME to make sure that I remember GNOME working properly.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
Original Message:
Sent: Feb 24, 2025 04:41 PM
From: Technogeezer
Subject: Resizing issues on Vmware Fusion 13.6
What changed between when you noticed it was working and "the last 2-3 days"?
The more interesting part of your post is that you say "all VMs". It would be interesting if you have a VM that is using GNOME or KDE as its desktop environment and see if that exhibits the same behavior.
What Fusion and macOS version are you using? Intel or Apple Silicon Mac? What version of Kali?
Just for the record, I've been working with Kali for 3 years now and when running the xfce default environment it's never changed resolution on screen resize on Apple Silicon. I'm in the process of checking it out on a PC running Workstation 17.1 and a Mac running Monterey and Fusion 13.5.2 just to see if I'm seeing anything different.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
Original Message:
Sent: Feb 24, 2025 02:48 PM
From: little things
Subject: Resizing issues on Vmware Fusion 13.6
From past few days, there has been a irritating issue of vm being able to resize itself to the window, like aligning the vm to the left of the monitor would automatically scale and resize the VM perfectly, but now black bars come around, snapping windows to sides does not happen. This happens in all VMs probably, i tried parrot and kali only both having this issue.
Note: Please do not say, this problem is due to long standing bug in kali xfce. Its in vmware only because i have been using kali for 1-2 years and it was working perfectly. Now from 2-3 days this error is happening. Please fix thiss!!!