colima VS orbstack

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

I recommend checking out OrbStack[0] for containers and VMs on MacOS.

It’s really, really, really awesome and performant. And it seems to be a one-man show. Really impressive.

Most I’ve shown it to have very quickly switched to it.

(I’m completely unaffiliated, just a happy user)

[0]: https://orbstack.dev/

For a brief moment, I thought this was related to https://orbstack.dev

If you use a Mac and just want to mess around with linux try something like Orbstack(https://orbstack.dev/) to start up VMs and mess around. The benefit of this is you're going to break things a bunch as you get started. Going from there I'd start looking automating the deployment of the various components the 'old fashioned' way aka writing shell scripts/using SSH. Once you do that then go to using things like Ansible or Terraform etc.

FerretDB provides a Docker image allowing us to run it locally, for example via Orbstack, with a couple of simple commands.

OrbStack | Founding Engineer | US/Europe REMOTE | Full-time | https://orbstack.dev

OrbStack is making Docker containers & development environments delightful. Our app replaces Docker Desktop and makes containers faster, lighter, and easier to work with. It's the tool of choice for PlanetScale, Replicate, and other hot companies.

Containers should be a joy to use, not something you have to put up with. Let's build the future of dev envs.

As a founding engineer, you'll mainly work on breaking high-level ideas down into tough systems problems, solving them, and taking ownership of projects. If https://cpu.land and https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture excite you, you'll be right in place.

Email: jobs orbstack dev

Before you give up, give OrbStack a try: https://orbstack.dev/

It’s significantly faster than Docker and some users in the Discord community have been able to use it to run hand-built Linux x86 VMs on Apple Silicon.

It’s a paid product though, but you can download it for free and try it out before paying.

If you haven't installed a Docker runtime, you might be happy with Orbstack. Other alternatives: DDEV docs: Docker installation.

For MacOS I can really recommend https://orbstack.dev

It integrates very nicely, has very low CPU idle usage and also lets you quickly spawn VMs with bidirectional file sharing set up.

Since I switched I haven't looked back.