AQEMU - a point-and-click QEMU front-end for Windows and Linux

Chronic Engineering — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:31:46 GMT

QEMU can emulate almost anything, but getting a guest running usually means a wall of command-line flags. AQEMU is my attempt to fix that: an open-source (GPL-2.0) Qt GUI that wraps QEMU and gives you ready-made machines instead.

What it does

Bundles QEMU 11, so there's nothing extra to install
Ships 195 ready-made guest profiles across 29 architectures: Windows 11 ARM, Windows 98, Solaris, TrueNAS, RISC-V and lots more
Native x64 and ARM64 builds for Windows, plus Linux builds
Hardware acceleration where the platform allows it: WHPX on Windows x64, KVM on Linux, with QEMU's TCG emulator as a fallback
An embedded VNC display, so guests run inside the app window

How it's built

AQEMU is a Qt 5 app in C++. The Windows builds use MSYS2 (GCC for x64, clang for ARM64) and are packaged as MSIX for the Microsoft Store. QEMU itself is upstream and unpatched, pulled in as a git submodule.

What's next

Hardware acceleration for ARM64 guests on Windows on Arm (via WHPX) is the next big piece of work.

Try it

Source: https://github.com/chronic8000/aqemu
Microsoft Store (7-day free trial): https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P0HGKHQ9W19?cid=devto

Issues, feedback and guest profile requests are very welcome on GitHub.