multipass VS kitematic

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

I have been using Multipass [0] for a while and it works great to quickly spin up an Ubuntu environment on my MacBook. It supports cloud config in case you want a custom instance.

It seems to be limited to running Ubuntu instances only (at least, I haven't figured out how to run other Linux instances) but if you want a quick clean Ubuntu VM I would recommend it.

0: https://multipass.run/

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️

Whenever I need a VM on my MacOS I reach out to Multipass[1].

It is a project by Canonical and has a decent amount of features to get the job done. However, it only supports Ubuntu VMs and has some rough edges.

[1] https://multipass.run/

For my selfhosted stuff, I use a combination of docker and multipass ( https://multipass.run/), Ubuntu.

Multipass was a big help for me learning kubeadm. Super easy to spin up Ubuntu VMs and kill them when you’re done. Virtualbox or libvirt would work too, but I found multipass to be easier for ephemeral headless instances

Vagrant or Multipass would be my first guesses. There isn't anything else out there that is going to orchestrate VMs the way you want.

Yeah, You need Hyper-V to run basic Docker configuration on Windows, I just simplified this too much I guess.

The end result is that if you run Docker on Windows with Hyper-V alone it's using Window filesystem and then "translating" this for Docker therefore making the whole process of accessing the files incredibly slow.

I used to work with docker using Docker Kinematic (https://github.com/docker/kitematic) in the past, which basically was a Virtual box with Docker installed inside this VM, and since the VM was some kind of Linux, it worked reasonably well.

The same seems to be the case when using WSL2 - you run VM and Docker inside this VM, removing the file sync/translation part out of the equation, resulting in speed boots.

Auttomatic Open Source Docker Open source Those are two i can think of that use those technologies, read the “contribution” part on github. If you search “open source projects” and the technologies you know, you’ll find even more. :)

Kitematic runs on Linux: https://github.com/docker/kitematic/releases, and so does Dockstation: https://dockstation.io