Quickemu

What hackers pick instead

• QEMUA free emulator and VM tool for running other CPU architectures, Windows and disposable test machines, though emulation is slow, setup is fiddly and older operating systems run poorly.114recommend
• UTMFree open-source app for running Linux and Windows virtual machines on Apple silicon Macs, with near-native speed. Common caveats: Windows slower than in Parallels, and some guests lack graphics acceleration.49recommend
• VirtualBoxFree, cross-platform virtual machine app that runs the same on Linux, Windows and Mac and is easy to set up. Common caveat: graphics, clipboard and guest-integration bugs.34recommend
• LimaFree tool for running Linux virtual machines on Mac and Linux, often used as a Vagrant replacement or for quick throwaway VMs. Caveat: defaults and folder mounting may not suit everyone.31recommend
• VagrantPeople recommend Vagrant for building repeatable, disposable VM environments from a Vagrantfile, with quick up and destroy cycles. Critics say HashiCorp has mostly abandoned it.25recommend

Every quote

The 15 most detailed of 16 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Piping Serrvers + quickemu felt like a cheatcode to me atleast for more ephemeral vm's based workflow

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion”

2. quickemu[0] is sort of amazing for these type of use cases actually

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Show HN: Clawk – Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop”

3. I am an absolute quickemu shill because I love that software

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion”

4. it looks very well thought out at first glance

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

5. quickemu [1] is good at running macOS VMs.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III”

6. Really useful tool, OSS for the win!!!

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

7. This is awesome. Bookmarked already.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

8. The emulated machine crashed trying to boot macOS, and I gave up after a couple of hours.

   Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

9. Recently I tried to get Windows running using quickemu but that also failed.

   Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March”

10. I highly recommend quickemu. It provides default ssh access,sshfs, vnc,spice

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Remote Code Execution in OpenCode, update now”

11. This might ease the learning curve for me.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

12. Doing stuff like this, and integrating it into the main project puts the whole thing at risk.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

13. It's arguably violating Apple's IP rights, they have taken down similar projects.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

14. No Windows binaries, even as qemu itself fully supports Windows hosts?

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”

15. I'm not even sure it supports aarch64 hosts.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Quickemu: Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux VMs”