Lets do some ranting because holy shit, this one takes the cake.
So I'm a daily user of virtualization software. Vmware Workstation has been my workhorse pretty much a decade now and has been acceptable for it's purposes.
Then Vmware got bought by Broadcom. You would think "they can't fuck up the software that fast, right?"
Well they couldn't do THAT but they got something else up their sleeve. The download process of the binaries.
With Vmware, it was pretty much one page with links to whichever platform you were on. You download a single binary and run it to install vmware. What does Broadcom do?
Well first of all, you need an account. Because of course you do. I don't know why but hey, they are a multi-billion company, I am sure they know best, right? Anyway, create an account. Fill out some details. Now you can get to the goodies right?
Wrong.
First of all, you need to find the right product first. And spelunking through Broadcom's website is maybe comparable to a root canal while you are going through colonoscopy. A maze would find itself lost in there.
Which is why I gave up and went to Google for help from which I found semi-straight links in a blog post somewhere who braved these waters before (I'm sorry brave soul that I misplaced your blog before writing this). Once there, you think "yes, now I can get my virtualization software and get some real work done."
Nope. You need to fill out some more forms. Some trade compliance thingy. I probably signed away my first-born child and someone's soul (alongside my own) during the process without realizing. Then you finally, (after some really really long calculations of... something) get to the tiny tiny icon that once you clicked, simsalabim! Your binaries started to download.
Oh and during this entire journey I have twice at least (I failed to keep accurate track since clicking those things are muscle memory these days) agreed to a "Terms of Service" which was an entire game of Where's Waldo in an of itself since the location of those checkboxes switch around.
By the way, isn't it fun that Broadcom's site wants to terrorize your browser with extra tabs by opening almost anything and everything in a whole new tab? Doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize you are running NoScript in your browser and each new tab requires new payload of JavaScript (I hope. At this point it's probably some arcane ritual to sacrifice virgins to molok or something) from half a dozen different domains.
So I finally got my software but I am dreading the updates. Like, terrified to ever open that site again and go through this bullshit more than once. I might switch to Oracle (eww). Or maybe go the linux, kvm, qemu route. What's the virtualization like in Macs these days? Hypervisor is a thing too. Maybe that'll do it. Anything but vmware. That's the mindset this little exercise has left me with.