When things like Docker Desktop and WSL started needing Hyper-V components is when I finally sat down and got comfortable with Hyper-V and made the switch.
That's what prompted me to look at Hyper-V in the first place, but VMware Player has been able to run with Hyper-V enabled for a long time now, and that's how I run it, as I do use WSL2 and also Sandbox for some things. I also thought it desirable to have one less piece of software to install, but I went back to Player partly due to crackling audio in Hyper-V, which apparently uses Remote Desktop for display, and RDP has had this issue ever since I first used it, probably back in 2004. I just ran the vanilla Hyper-V VM I created back in 2019 for Windows 10 Pro guest, and it's the same as it ever was, though I am now running it on my Windows 11 host. The other reason was no USB passthrough, which is a dealbreaker. Doing a quick google, I see there are various articles on enabling it in Hyper-V, such as this one:
Learn how to perform Hyper-V USB passthrough. Discover the best methods, common requirements and limitations.
www.nakivo.com
I verified that Enhanced Session mode was enabled as described in the "Hyper-V USB Passthrough with Enhanced Session Mode" section, which it already was for both Server and User, and I followed the steps to enable "Other Devices" per Step 10 of that section, and it still doesn't work. If I'm doing something wrong, I have no idea what, and with VMware Player, It Just Works and always has.
Ifff yoouuu likeee yourrrr vmssss runninggggg sooo slowlyyyyy LOL.
Hyper-V knock spots of the type 2 hypervisors in terms of performance.
That may be true for resource-intensive loads, but I've never found VMware Player to be problematically slow for the ways I use it. Comparing UI things like moving the mouse over Favorites in my Firefox sidebar, the highlight lags the mouse in both Hyper-V and VMware Player, so they are both perceptibly slower than using the host machine. Hyper-V does load the VM to the guest desktop around 15% faster than Player, but it's apples and oranges to some degree, as my Hyper-V VM from 2019 is bare bones in comparison to my Player VM. It hasn't been easy to test, because half the time, Hyper-V is giving me messages like "Another session for your user is blocked notifying Local Session Manager for 0 minutes, so we are unable to log you in". I have no idea why; I'm shutting the guest OS down between runs. Never seen anything like that with Player.
Also, I tend not to leave VMs running all the time, nor do I run more than one at the same time, and I find the Player UI much less fiddly to use for simple things like starting and stopping VMs. It's just a nice, relatively simple program that does everything I need as well or better than Hyper-V, and I've never killed my host networking requiring image restore when configuring VMware Player networking.
