This might sound silly, but I installed virt-manager to make things a little easier when using qemu, then created a new virtual machine with debian 12 on it... then installed qemu on that.
The actual reason for this is to make github account separation a little easier...
If you get virt-manager set up properly, it definitely makes using qemu easier, though. I practically just had to tell it to make a new virtual machine using this iso with this much memory and this big of a hard drive, and it was right at the debian install screen. (Set it up with xfce...).
Main tricky parts were that I had to install libvirt first, make myself a member of the libvirt user group, enable the service, and install dnsmasq. Not great, but could've been worse...
Used debian on the virtual box just for a little variety. I like to keep my hand in on different distributions a bit.