So, first of all, you will need to ensure that you have ‘yay’ installed

you do this by running

which yay 

if installed then it should return something along the lines of

/usr/bin/yay

if it isn’t installed then you can install it with pacman

sudo pacman -S yay 

you also need to have linux headers installed, first you need to find out the kernel version you are running

uname -r

gives you the kernel version

at time of writing, I am using kernel 5.1.8, so you take the first 2 numbers and put them after linux to get the right headers, running kernel 5.1.8 gives me 51, so I’d use the following command

sudo pacman -S linux51-headers 

If you were using kernel 4.9.49 you would install linux49-headers and so on

Once installed, we can use yay to install vmware-workstation

before we do that though, we will need to import the PGP key that will enable the installation of ncurses5-compat-libs

run the following

gpg --keyserver hkps://pgp.mit.edu:443 --recv-keys C52048C0C0748FEE227D47A2702353E0F7E48EDB

Once thats imported then you are all set to install vmware-workstation

yay vmware-workstation

Follow the instructions and choose the options you require, once completed there are a few more steps required to ensure everything works as intended for you to have a functional vmware-workstation install

sudo systemctl enable vmware-networks.service

sudo systemctl enable vmware-usbarbitrator.service

Finally, if you upgrade the kernel, you will need to sort the headers, to be clear, minor incremental upgrades don't need new headers, but if you switched from say 4.19 to 4.20 then you would

For example when I switched from my previous kernel (5.0.21) to 5.1.8 I needed new headers for VMWare to keep working

First, check your kernel version with

uname -r

to upgrade to the 5.1.8 headers I used

sudo pacman -S linux51-headers 

then we need to fix our vmware install to use the new kernel, you can do that by copying the line returned from ‘uname -r’ and pasting that after ‘sudo dkms install vmware-workstation/15.1.0_13591040 -k ‘

so when I upgraded to 5.1.8, ‘uname -r’ returned 5.1.8-1-MANJARO, so I ran

sudo dkms install vmware-workstation/15.1.0_13591040 -k 5.1.8-1-MANJARO

Obviously if you are running a different version of vmware-workstation then you will need to amend that number in the command too