

I couldn’t find the specific reasoning for this change, but I feel like QEMU is probably just too holistic to be appropriate for this kind of project.
QEMU needs to be able to emulate all the ARM hardware with enough fidelity to boot a naive operating system. For the purposes of running userspace applications almost all of that is not required, you really just need to convert one ABI to the other and translate the instructions. No need to handle firmware, the MMU, interrupts, disks etc.
It would allow SSH if the desktop is locked, they’re separate. If you can get in via SSH then you can poke around logs like dmesg and see what’s up. There will probably be some messages to give you something more specific to search with.