popey, 
I made Quicktest, a script to automate testing of Linux distro releases.
It spins up the OS of your choice in a VM and then runs a set of steps to inject keypresses into the VM so that it can run the tests.
If successful, you get a little timelapse of screenshots and a log of what happened.
It can run in a window, or headless in the background. It takes about 7 mins to do an install of #Ubuntu
There's an asciinema and timelapse linked in the README.md below ⬇️