I’ve been looking to get a peek at the updates to Mate in 26.04 using Vmware Workstation. Once installed either by going the Ubuntu 26.04 server route and then installing mate packages or doing a dev upgrade of a working ubuntu 24.04, both result in the same issue. The display doesn’t respond to Vmware window resize events and the Display program within Ubuntu Mate doesn’t recognize available monitor resolutions. So, I’m stuck at a very low resolution. I’ve tried Lubuntu & Ubuntu Cinnamon with the same result. Xubuntu sees all the resolutions but doesn’t respond to resize events. Ubuntu and Kubuntu work without issue.
Has anyone figured out a work around or know what’s happening?
Not the answer you are looking for. But do you really have to use Vmware?
I tried to download just so I can test. But gave up.
First, I had to create an account with Broadcom (just to download sw?), then had to navigate through maze of logins, agreements, chatbot and finally when I got to download page, the download button is hidden at extreme right after the checksum columsn. OK I still clicked on it only to be prompted for ‘Account verification’ with my full details except perhaps social security number! What the…
Sorry @jmadams1000. Not that I am clever enough and would have resolved your issue, but I cannot even start. Hope somebody familiar with it will be able to help you.
When looking at some logs I got the feeling that there might be some GNOME’isms in it the SPICE agent. Or perhaps the switch to Wayland for GNOME and KDE has something to do with it. Not a Mate user, but I believe it’s still X11 only, like LxQt.
I sometimes get the same in GNOME. I can get it back by setting the display resolution from the drop-down list to the one of the VM windows; should be easy to spot, because it’s usually not an exact display resolution, e.g. 1864x724. After that the VM starts responding again to the resize events. Also, setting the display to the host’s native resolution and the refresh rate to 75 Hz, when the VM is in fullscreen mode, seems to have the same effect.
In the spirit of troubleshooting, I installed Virtual Box from Ubuntu’s repository on my 24.04 Ubuntu Mate Lab computer. It didn’t work out of the box and I had to blacklist KVM kernel drivers first. It also prevented me from running yesterday’s ubuntu update that included the latest HWE kernel (7.0.) Once I uninstalled virtual box, the update went fine. Anyhow, Ubuntu Mate 26.04 does automatically resize when the window is resized. Unfortunately, I had several instances where the machine would freeze. I’m sure these issues could be worked out with further troubleshooting.
I think peterwhite23 is likely right - it has to do with it still being X11 based.
I’ll keep looking at it and perhaps put a message in the Broadcom/Vmware forums.
