I started using VMware more than 10 years ago because of the good USB support for license dongles and pki stuff. I am using Windows as a development machine.
I must admit that the license was cheap, it worked, so I didn't took the time to explore alternatives. But for what I understood, my use case doesn't exist anymore. You cannot buy a single pro license anymore. So, the day I upgrade my system, I may be forced to switch to another solution.
I also have a Linux host with Windows VMs running VMWare and KVM/qemu didn't work for me because the VMs don't capture Alt-Tab and other combinations. This is a major annoyance when doing development on the VMs. There were other small things that made me go back to VMware but I can't recall exactly what they were.
I guess you are not logging into the VM using a remote desktop client? But using the the spice client?
One of my favourite alternatives is using Steam Remote Play, you get the low latency, works for games at the cost of much higher bandwidth. But for a home environment this is fine.
