No luck on getting the Qemu img to run under VirtualBox, I'm running a last generation Macbook Pro with Homebrew providing the Qemu environment. Which unfortunately isn't feature complete. On VirtualBox on MacOSX host, I get some random "unsupported version error" that comes up when I try to install the qemu .img file as either QCOWS or QCOWS2. I'll need to try converting the Qemu image into another format, unfortunately a lot of the tools seem pretty old.

Also by way of the chat room I was informed that while PureOS will be the same phone or desktop eventually, just installing phosh on a PureOS VM at the moment will not be enough.

Other options are to dual boot my Mac into Linux (more side work than I want to get into right now). Or run Qemu into the PureOS VM I created in VirtualBox (works without the dynamically sized drive and drive encryption).

Seems like we need some serious work on lowering the barrier for entry here.