QEMU is absolutely incredible. I think its most undersold feature is the fact that it runs on Windows hosts[0] thanks to MinGW. This in itself isn't unique, but what is unique is that by default it runs entirely without admin privileges. I've been playing with shipping server apps as QEMU VMs and it works surprisingly well. QEMU itself is small enough (~20MB) to ship the entire thing with the app, including DLLs.

With -accel whpx you can even get pretty solid CPU acceleration. WHPX[1] is sort of like KVM for Windows, only takes a couple clicks and a reboot to enable, and ships on both Windows Home and Pro. Other than the heroes who did the actual work, we probably have Android to thank[2] for this situation.

If you're willing to get your hands a little dirty, QEMU is a fairly viable alternative to WSL or even Docker on Windows.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/android/get-started...

[2]: https://developer.android.com/studio/run/emulator-accelerati...