I wouldn't do well under load, but it was fine for running an interactive shell without X. There might be a bit of swapping when switching your attention from

I wouldn't do well under load, but it was fine for running an interactive shell without X. There might be a bit of swapping when switching your attention from one VM to another, only a few seconds. Qemu is a nice way to try out some different systems! I'll try running the VMs on my new mini laptop and see how that goes.