I can't say I share your hatred. It's my go-to management interface for VMs like this. Especially because it allows managing a remote libvirt install over SSH, handling things like forwarding the screen and input for you.

If you don't want to pick an OS preset, you can always just go for "manual install" and a "generic" OS and pick your own preferred configuration later. Or you paste the URL for an online install directory, which is even easier.

To manage libvirt machine without root, you can add your user to the libvirt group.

You can add directories to the storage, including ones in your home directory. Generic is actually the default option, all you have to do is to disable auto-detection.

It's fine to run qemu directly, but virt-manager ain't bad.

I don't share your antipathy against libvirt, but I do the same. To configure a qemu vm via libvirt you need to learn two concepts: the qemu internals, and how they're mapped to libvirt properties. And since the qemu internals are mostly documented as command-line switches, you can skip learning the libvirt mappings by just using shell.

> Virt manager drives me crazy because it hides the VM files in its own directory with permissions that aren't yours forcing you to use sudo to manually manage your own fucking vm files.

I just checked my `~/.local/share/libvirt/`. It doesn't do this for me, and I don't think it ever has.

I do remember having to set this up at some point. Looks like this is it:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/799034/whats-the-di...

There are some limits around network ports in User Sessions, but it should suffice for anything you'd use Vagrant for.

> Creating a new VM? You're forced to pick an OS by typing the name of your OS into a search box which is tedious and doesnt give you an option for generic x86 machine.

...There is though? It's in the dropdown under "Generic or unknown OS. Usage is not recommended (generic)". Here it is in the code if you don't believe me:

https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/blob/c3df2ba/vi...

And a random tutorial which makes use of it:

https://cyberlab.pacific.edu/courses/comp178/resources/virtu...