VMWare copy/paste integration does not work with native wayland apps.
Alright, so this is a funky corner case, but it's biting me reasonably hard.
VMWare Workstation Pro 15.5.2 build-15785246 uses XWayland, and appears to try and only allow the guest operating systems to see the system clipboard when clipboard integration is enabled and the virtual machine window has focus.
I am running in a Wayland Gnome instance on Ubuntu 20.04 on the host, and Windows 10 in the guest.
Note that this is trying to use the paste functionality in an application in the guest OS, selecting Edit -> Paste from VMWare itself mostly works, but generally pastes poorly into Windows applications.
Copy from the guest OS and paste into the host OS works as expected.
Copy from the host OS and paste into the guest OS works only for some X11 (running under xwayland) applications, and does not work at all for native wayland applications.
The easiest demonstration of this is xfce4-terminal. When run from another terminal with no changes, it starts up as a wayland application and no attempts to copy text will succeed at pasting into the guest OS under VMWare. Whatever was previously in the copy buffer that VMWare can see will be pasted instead.
When run from another terminal with 'WAYLAND_DISPLAY= xfce4-terminal' it starts as a X11 application under xwayland, and copy from the terminal works as expected and pastes into the VMWare guest entirely as expected.
When doing more testing, wl-copy also fails to copy text into a clipboard that VMWare can access, but oddly xclip and xsel also fail to copy text into a clipboard that VMWare can access.
Behavior similar to xfce4-terminal can be seen with applications such as Firefox, which work when run as an X11 application and fail when run as a wayland application.