Forgive me, QEMU, I must install w*ndows on you.
@themilkman @xyfdi I wanted to try it and I have a habit of making life difficult for myself.
I might try win10, actually. It's been so long since I pirated an OS I don't know where to find ISOs anymore 
@VD15 @themilkman I usually end up going to some key site to buy a win10 license for a couple of euros.
@VD15 I found some time to play with this again... I got a bit further.. I had to resort to libvirt, virtsh, and virt-manager.
Now to fix the fucking networking...
@xyfdi How am I configuring QEMU? Unsuccessfully.
I just have a shell script where I'm throwing all my args so I can invoke it easier. I'm currently trying with libvirt. I want to run a game on here that doesn't run under wine/proton and I may need the low overhead. But binbows 11 keeps moaning at me that my VM doesn't meet the minimum requirements and in classic michaelsoft fashion doesn't tell me what requirements I'm missing.