Yeah, I used to run desktop apps in containers back in the days when Linux was my primary OS. I also used systemd-nspawn for a while. But I had to give up when I switched from Linux as I am unable to replicate the desired (graphic) performance. I now use headless VMs instead.

If it starts raining again, it would be interesting to experiment with VNC and VirtualGL… The qemu displays above were all software based

VNC has always been too sluggish for my liking. I used to use X11 forwarding which is basically native performance when forwarding from a container.

Yeah, I guess that XQuartz is still the easiest solution - it was mostly that the qemu cocoa display was broken