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I found this script to be a simple rather nice solution to the things that I missed from Vagrant. The QCOW2 image files are simply files kept in a single location, I can use the filesystem to manage these, and refer to them via the aforementioned environment variable. The ability to provision machines is done simply by copying the provision script and executing it to the machine once booted, and portforwarding is hacked ontop of that too. You can find this script here if you're interested in making use of it yourself.
Laravel wanted to make the entire PHP development process as seamless as possible. At the time, Laravel achieved this with Laravel Homestead, apre-packaged Vagrant box. Everything you would need would be bundled into a virtual machine, nice and neat, away from your OS. And this was how I was introduced to Vagrant. A means of packaging virtual machines into a portable format, so you could easily create local development environments. Vagrant worked by using a Vagrantfile to describe the virtual machine you would want to use, how it would be provisioned, the ports you would forward, and the filepaths you would want shared from host to guest. All of these tasks would be handled by the provider, the underlying virtual machine program itself, in my case, VirtualBox. Perhaps the one thing I liked the most about Vagrant, was the ability to provision my machine, clear down if I wanted to and have it back in a clean state for development.
As someone who enjoys playing video games, and a recent convert to Linux, I was well aware of the derth of support for games. I was also aware of some of the solutions, one of those being GPU passthrough to this thing called QEMU. QEMU is a fast and lightweight machine emulator and virtualizer. This was of course something that interested me, so I went about exploring QEMU and playing with it. When I first started using it, I was offput by it. No slick UI to use, a myriad of flags to pass it, some flags which even took more options. But when I figured out the right incantation of flags to pass it, it worked, and I noticed its speed in comparison to VirtualBox.
WampServer was exactly what I needed. Something that would allow me to create a proper web application with a web server, a database, and even OpenSSL, locally on my machine. It even provided a user interface to help with the management of this all, no need with mucking around with configuration files. As time went on my understanding of programming grew, as did my knowledge in the realm of web development. I eventually stumbled upon a new growing web framework that made developing in PHP even easier - Laravel.
At this point when it came to my hobbyist development, I had moved past PHP and started learning Go, and was looking to do some serious development with this for a CI platform I had an idea for. By now, I had a firmer grasp of the software stack I wanted to work with, a better understanding of how everything pieced together. And so I went about developing that CI platform, that would later become Djinn CI. I uninstalled VirtualBox and Vagrant and fully committed to using QEMU, booting up the local machine was as simple as hitting CTRL + R in my terminal, searching for qemu and hitting enter, an elegant solution I know.