u/s3rvant

Yep iirc virt manager is just a gui front end for qemu though imo certainly makes it easier to manage the vm's

Yep, initially tried to setup virtual box as I'm more familiar there but could not for the life of me get around install errors. After setting the OS to read-write installing virt manager was pretty straight forward; the only real hiccup I had was that I needed to install win-fsp on the guest os before installing guest additions like virtio-fs which allowed me to add the shared folder between host/guest. Edit: it also required enabling shared memory and updating some registry keys during windows install to ignore the windows 11 install requirements.

My son-in-law got a deck as a cheap gaming PC but also needed to be able to use Adobe software which we were struggling to get working in bottles / wine so we setup virt manager and added a windows VM with a shared folder between host and guest VM. Works great and he's learning a lot about linux as his daily driver without losing access to the tools he needs for work.