colima VS docker-machine-for-mac

I'm surprised this says "with focus on running containers", I thought that would be colima, which uses Lima but is a separate project. https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Lima is more of a nice way to run a Linux VM on Mac in a way that integrates the guest and the host systems to a good degree by default. It wraps either QEMU or Apple's VZ framework.

For a more traditional VM GUI, there's https://mac.getutm.app/ which is a completely separate project that also wraps QEMU or VZ.

While looking into the issue with Podman, I came across colima. Apart from being able to run AMD64 images out of the box, there were additional benefits to it, one of which was, unlike podman, colima could use Rosetta 2 for x64 emulation (which is significantly more performant).

If you don't need a GUI, the following combo works pretty well:

- https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

- https://github.com/peterldowns/localias

You might look into CoLima as a way to get started.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima?tab=readme-ov-file

Its user interface is Docker-like, using containers.

For full desktop, I've only used the commercial app "Parallels", which can set up an Ubuntu desktop for you. Also Fedora and Alpine and Debian I believe.

But

> I don't really have any resources to share. I just know how to boot a vmlinuz with an initramfs using QEMU, and decided to download the Linux kernel source code and try compiling it.

I highly recommend working through Linux from Scratch and possibly the Gentoo Handbook. It's a journey.

I could not find any guide how to add WASM container capability to Docker running on Colima. This guide provides a few Colima templates for exactly this, which adds WasmEdge, Wasmtime and Wasmer runtime types.

Colima runs much faster on Macos: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

After docker desktop became unusable, I jumped to colima and never looked back. I still use the docker runtime in it (the non-proprietary part) but it also supports containerd. On Mac it's just a "brew install colima" and then "colima start"

I also install the compose and ecr credentials plug-ins (since I use ecr for my container registry.) It has the full functionality of docker desktop minus the UI, which I never used anyways.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

On my M1 Pro system, I have nothing but positive things to say about the experience of using Colima (https://github.com/abiosoft/colima). Quick to set up and fast to use.

I'd say Lima and Colima should be enough for most use cases:

https://lima-vm.io/

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima