With a not insane amount of work you can get a cross compile toolchain up and at least make binaries. Not a lot of packaging systems focus on the cross-compile workflow for package generation though. (I mean there are some, but it's not exactly the standard for fedora or debian.)

Cross compiling is doable and easier with the newer versions of Debian. One Qt issue I had is that a bunch of stuff is dependent upon OpenGL, which wasn't well supported with the Pi stuff when I was poking around at it. Qt is also just a beast to cross-compile.

Rust is much, much nicer to cross compile but lacks a nice GUI. I've been poking at Cursive.rs for TUI stuff in an attempt to hack up my own scan tool so we'll see where that goes.

qemu is capable of emulating an ARM cpu so yes but won't be able to emulate all the real hardware, especially the opengl ES gpu. From a compilation perspective I believe using a cross compiler is way more efficient than emulating the whole system.

> ...especially the OpenGL ES GPU...

Does Virgil3D not work in DBT QEMU targets?

Generally agree that cross-compilation is a better solution, but I think it could also be nice to have everything (except the drivers for your actual hardware) tested as delivered.