Quickemu

Two shell scripts wrapped around QEMU/KVM. quickget downloads an OS image from its upstream source and writes a config file for it; quickemu reads that config, looks at the host's own hardware, and starts a virtual machine tuned to it. No elevated permissions are needed to run the VM, and both the config and the disk image can live anywhere — a home directory, a USB stick.

MIT licensed, 16,330 stars / 744 forks / 72 open issues and pull requests (GitHub API, 2026-09-27), 2,306+ commits on master. The repository dates to 2020-03-15 and was last pushed 2026-09-14 — thirteen days before this read, which for a project this size reads as active rather than coasting. It carries a hacktoberfest topic and open CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and SECURITY.md files, so it takes outside contributions rather than running as one person's script. Unusually, it also ships an AGENTS.md — instructions aimed at an AI coding agent working on the repo, not a human contributor guide; not explored further here, but a small sign of who the project now expects to send it patches.

What it runs

The claim is close to a thousand operating system editions: macOS guests from Mojave through Sequoia, Windows 10 and 11 (with TPM 2.0) plus Server 2016/2019/2022, Ubuntu and every official flavour, most BSDs, and a shelf of niche systems — FreeDOS, Haiku, KolibriOS, OpenIndiana, ReactOS. ARM64 guests run natively on an ARM64 host and emulated on x86_64. Hosts are Linux and macOS only; there is no Windows host support.

Feature list for a hypervisor front end: full SPICE with shared host/guest clipboard, three file- sharing paths depending on guest OS (VirtIO-webdavd, VirtIO-9p, or Samba if the host runs smbd), QEMU Guest Agent integration over QMP, VirGL graphics acceleration, USB and smartcard pass-through, automatic SSH and general port forwarding, full-duplex audio, Braille display support, and EFI boot with or without SecureBoot alongside legacy BIOS. None of this is unusual for QEMU itself; the point of the project is that quickget nixos unstable minimal followed by quickemu --vm nixos-unstable-minimal.conf gets all of it without hand-writing a QEMU command line.

Not a compatibility layer, and worth saying why

compatibility-layer holds two sources that make software run somewhere its author never targeted it by reimplementing or intercepting the interface it expects — Wine's Win32 API (proton-wine-andrevto) and proot's syscall interception (proot-distro). Quickemu reaches the same destination — an OS running somewhere its vendor did not build it for — by the opposite route: it changes nothing about the guest. KVM virtualizes real hardware and boots the guest's own unmodified kernel. Nothing is faked, so nothing can be missing the way Wine can be missing a Win32 call; the price instead is running two complete operating systems on one machine, and needing the guest's install media in the first place.

That is why it belongs beside the register rather than inside it, the same way calibre's reverse- engineered device protocol sits beside it without redefining it. Two mechanisms, two costs, one question: who gets to say what runs on this hardware.

One case sharpens that question rather than just illustrating it. The repository tags itself hackintosh, and macOS is a supported guest. Apple's own software licence restricts macOS to Apple-branded hardware; Quickemu's quickget/quickemu pair runs it on whatever the host happens to be. omniwm, the spoke's other macOS-adjacent source, pays Apple's toll directly — signed, notarized builds so Gatekeeper allows them, one point release from breakage. Quickemu does not pay it at all; it does not ask. Between "reimplement the interface" and "ask permission and pay for it," this is a third answer this spoke had not held before: run the real thing, and skip the question of whether you were allowed to.

What the page does not know

The README makes no privacy or "no cloud" claim of any kind — the first source in this spoke that does not pitch autonomy at all, because there is nothing to sell: quickget reaches out to the upstream OS vendor for every image it fetches, on the record, and the project does not pretend otherwise.

The maintainer trail was read and not paged. GitHub's social links on the org point to Martin Wimpress (flexiondotorg), and Linux Matters podcast episode notes credit its hosts with the project's 2024 revival; both are named by this one source and deferred per this spoke's recurrence convention (see index.md → Notes) rather than given a Person or Organization page. Install methods, governance, and anything past the front page live in a ten-page GitHub wiki that was not read past its table of contents — narrow reading, not because there was nothing there.

Related

foss-application · compatibility-layer · omniwm · proot-distro · proton-wine-andrevto · calibre