quickemu-project/quickemu

Quickemu is a command-line tool that makes it easy to create and run virtual machines on a Linux or macOS host. A virtual machine is a sandboxed computer running inside your computer, useful for trying out other operating systems without touching your real install. Under the hood Quickemu drives QEMU, which is a powerful but notoriously fiddly virtualisation program, and picks sensible defaults so you do not have to configure it by hand. The tool comes as a pair of shell scripts. The first, quickget, downloads the official installation image for the operating system you choose and writes a matching configuration file. The second, quickemu, reads that file, inspects your hardware, and launches the virtual machine with settings tuned to your machine. The README shows a two-line example: quickget nixos unstable minimal to fetch and configure NixOS, then quickemu --vm nixos-unstable-minimal.conf to start it. Running quickget with no arguments prints the list of all supported systems. The README says nearly a thousand operating system editions are supported. This includes Ubuntu and all of its official flavours, many other Linux distributions, macOS versions from Mojave through Sequoia, Windows 10 and 11 (with TPM 2.0 emulation), Windows Server 2016, 2019 and 2022, several BSDs, and curiosities like FreeDOS, Haiku, KolibriOS, OpenIndiana, and ReactOS. ARM64 guests can be run natively on ARM hosts and emulated on x86_64. Feature-wise the tool exposes SPICE for graphical access with host-guest clipboard sharing, several file-sharing methods (VirtIO-webdavd, VirtIO-9p, Samba if smbd is installed), the QEMU Guest Agent, VirGL graphics acceleration, USB and smartcard pass-through, automatic SSH and arbitrary network port forwarding, full-duplex audio, braille support, and a choice of EFI (with or without SecureBoot) or Legacy BIOS boot. Virtual machines and their configuration can live anywhere, including external USB storage, and no elevated permissions are needed to run them. The project ships a wiki with installation instructions and separate guides for creating Linux, macOS, and Windows virtual machines, along with advanced configuration topics and a list of alternative front-ends, including the related Quickgui desktop application.