VMware Desktop Hypervisor Pro Apps Now Available for Personal Use

Single codebase with free updates will be good for security.

Free personal use license as commercial moves to $120/year.

Do VMware desktop apps collect telemetry on install or usage?

Yes if you join SEIP (opt-in). Unknown or maybe no otherwise. Use an application-oriented firewall like Little Snitch to disallow it. It will need comms to grab guest support drivers and to check for updates.

Thats kind of a surprise, given its Broadcom, but very handy. My license for Parallels expired a while back, so this gives me a way to move forward...

UTM is a great (and open source) alternative on macOS as well...

https://mac.getutm.app/

It's a wrapper around Qemu and Apple's Virtualization Framework, so the performance is actually pretty good and it supports emulation of other architectures.

UTM FTW. It can do (slow) x86_64 v16n on arm.

Closing the barn door after the cows already left: it doesn't do x86_64 v16n on arm64, so it's moot.

LOL go to download, broadcom login page, no create button... ugh