What it means is anyone's guess, but it's just Broadcom diversifying, as they have to move away from semiconductor products to keep financially solvent. It's likely that they will sell it down the road, to someone like Microsoft or Oracle.

Hm, I just saw the news and thought it might be an important news.
Some of us use VMware products for their projects/hobby, after all.

Hopefully not Oracle or Adobe. These companies didn't have an exactly, uhm, lucky hand with their business decisions from an user's point of view, I think.

I wasn't expecting this today

Me, neither. It's worse enough that Oracle has control over Virtual Box, I think.
If they would finally being able to shutdown the rival.. Not a happy sight.

A sudden deal. It wasn't on the news lately. I hope that doesn't mean a downfall to their VM service.

At least VirtualBox is open-source so that makes it a little harder for Oracle to kill it. Someone would probably just fork it like all the other open-source stuff Oracle acquired from Sun and tried to kill (OpenOffice, MySQL, Solaris, Hudson)

It would be nice if the Broadcom acquisition resulted in more reasonable prices. I've wanted a copy of VMWare Workstation for years but US$200 (NZ$300) is a bit much given VirtualBox is free

Virtual Box is slow and buggy.

Found out today that it has had a repeating key bug for years that hasn't yet been fixed.

I really like VMware and have been using it for years. I hope that it doesn't get destroyed.

I also noticed the latest Symantec Ghost tools now have the Broadcom brand in their title. Broadcom bought that in 2019.
So I only care for the core Ghost imaging executable and Ghost-Explorer. I see no real difference except that they changed compiler to make them NT6 only, and they are now 3-times larger for some reason.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-05-24, 01:33:

Virtual Box is slow and buggy.

Found out today that it has had a repeating key bug for years that hasn't yet been fixed.

I really like VMware and have been using it for years. I hope that it doesn't get destroyed.

I haven't used VBox in years. How are the 3D acceleration and sound drivers as compared to VMware

Think they stopped supporting 3D acceleration in XP back in 2021 for VirtualBox.

Vmware workstation (possibly player as well but I haven't checked) still works with D3D and OGL in 2000+ guests.
For Vmware you'll still need to use the SetTimerService if you experience audio issues.
Guess additions work on 95+ but for Vista you'll need to hunt down the 10.3.10-12406962 additions since none are supplied with Vmware and you'll need these asl well for working D3D and OGL.
Vmware Workstation also still works with macOS as a guest just without 3D acceleration.

Haven't seen Vmware do much with Workstation so unless they stop selling it I don't see how it can get worse.

DosFreak wrote on 2022-05-24, 19:57:

Think they stopped supporting 3D acceleration in XP back in 2021 for VirtualBox. […]
Show full quote

Think they stopped supporting 3D acceleration in XP back in 2021 for VirtualBox.

Vmware workstation (possibly player as well but I haven't checked) still works with D3D and OGL in 2000+ guests.
For Vmware you'll still need to use the SetTimerService if you experience audio issues.
Guess additions work on 95+ but for Vista you'll need to hunt down the 10.3.10-12406962 additions since none are supplied with Vmware and you'll need these asl well for working D3D and OGL.
Vmware Workstation also still works with macOS as a guest just without 3D acceleration.

Haven't seen Vmware do much with Workstation so unless they stop selling it I don't see how it can get worse.

IMHO the VBox 3d acceleration could never compare to the VMware acceleration and with VBox killing it's support for XP, VMware remains the only (mainstream) true option for 3d acceleration on XP and older.

I wouldn't say that. WineD3D worked for me since the late 2000s.
I loved VBox, always satisfied my humble needs..

The best of VBox was its strong forward/backwards compatibility, I think.
You could mix old VMs with new VBox hosts and vice versa.

Also, VBox was available to older or obscure hosts for a long time.
So you could choose any system you wanted as a host, as your digital home.

If needed, you could boot up, say, a modern VM with Windows 10 for interaction with society (Skype, recent browser for home banking, cursed Office 365, etc).

But at the same time, you could still use your older VM with Windows XP and Visual Basic 6, Delphi 7
and tinker with old Voxel engines or the DirectX 7 SDK.
You could run some old games, too or run older PCB design software, use your EEPROM programmer with its 32-Bit drivers.

For example, I'm using an old Macintosh without hardware-assisted virtualization and with OS X 10.6.8, because it still looks pretty (Aqua, 3D glossy symbols, skeuomorphism) and can run my favorite Power PC applications.

By comparison, VMware with a 3D-accelerated VM doesn't run on that Macintosh anymore,
because it made Intel-VT/AMD-V a requirement and dropped OS support for Snow Leopard.

And Parallels Desktop for Mac..
It drops host OS support rather quickly. And there are no free upgrades.
Every new releases of mac OS required an updated copy of Parallels.
And I don't even blame Parallels for that.
Apple really loves to removes functions, add restrictions or move paths around.

But with VirtualBox, these updates were always free of charge and all releases were properly archived and accessible.

Edit: Edited.