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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

I love how there is absolutely no mention that it is mac-only (or even what versions of mac are supported), even on the download page.

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Was just about to post this. Apple heads tend to think that Mac is the default. Funny when you realise that the problem OrbStack is trying to fix is that MacOS isn't Linux.

Rather people using a UNIX, that isn't GNU/Linux, instead of sponsoring Linux OEMs.

Pretty sure orbstack won't run on other unix systems.

Buying a Linux powered laptop would have sorted out the problem in first place.

Yeah, because it won't ever wake up from sleep. :p

Windows already has WSL2 and Docker would run natively on Linux anyway.

Yes. I'd like to have something that runs Docker images on desktop but doesn't require a privileged daemon, users, groups, etc.

Is Podman Desktop available on your platform?

Podman is rootless containers done correctly.

Thanks. I will try that.

(I want to run Open Drone Map on Ubuntu desktop. ODM is a collection of image processing software from OpenCV and similar sources loosely bolted together to merge aerial photos from drones into a 3D model. So it has the install from hell unless containerized. ODM had a snap version, but the snap maintainer left the project.)

Probably not what you're looking for but I just wanted to mention Apptainer (previously Singularity). I find that it is usually easier to integrate and doesn't rely on a daemon. You can still use docker images as base.

Agreed. Apptainer is great for this use case.

Yeah, I was quite confused, especially by the title "docker containers and Linux"? What does that mean? If you can run Linux you can run docker. I thought it might have been a batteries included Linux distro at first.

Which other platform would you expect it to be for?

It advertises as an alternative to Docker Desktop which is for Windows and Linux as well.

The thing Docker Desktop (and analogues like Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, etc.) is useful for (a) is setting up a Linux guest VM so that you can run Linux containers and (b) doing some socket forwarding magic so that when you run the `docker` CLI on the host operating system, it acts as a remote client for dockerd running on the guest.

There's little point in running Docker Desktop on Linux because you don't need either (a) or (b) on Linux (nor the equivalents for Podman or your favorite Kubernetes distribution). You get the overhead and annoyances of running all your containers under a second OS running under your first one for what— an Electron GUI? I guess it's something if you're really worried about container escapes during local development. But it doesn't generally seem worth it to me.

The other thing OrbStack integrates is letting you spin up many 'machines' that have fast startup and efficiently share resources with each other. But OrbStack achieves that by running long-lived system containers on a single guest VM. If you're on Linux, you can just do that directly, just like the Docker containers, using the same tools¹ OrbStack uses under the hood. The CLI for Incus (a descendant if lxd, associated with Linux containers and LXC) is really pretty nice, too.

OrbStack has a lot of polish and performance optimizations that make it really competitive against other tools like it. There's lots of thoughtful touches in it beyond the basic ideas outlined above. But I wouldn't recommend any tool in its class to someone running a Linux desktop/laptop/workstation who wants to use containers in development. Just use the real things directly and learn the normal, universal CLIs.

1: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

Asked the other way around, why would anyone think a Docker container runner would be tied to MacOS?

Because Windows users are unlikely to care about Docker and Linux people don’t pay for stuff

This is hilarious and perfectly sums up my experience with Mac developers. Half of them have no idea Docker Desktop actually installs a Linux VM. They think how amazing their incredibly expensive system is, yet it's mostly a glorified text editor. The WSL experience on Windows convinced me buying a MacOS machine makes no sense.

So I use WSL2 regularly on Windows, but I don't agree at all that buying a Mac doesn't make sense. WSL2 is great, and Windows 10/11 are fine after doing some cleanup...on a desktop. My experience with Windows on even modern laptops is pretty bad.

It's very hard to find something with the build quality and affordances of a Mac. Razer makes a good machine but tbh I'd be embarrassed to bring one to a meeting, and I don't like how newer Thinkpads feel and I don't trust Framework to exist in a few years. It's then complicated while seeking reasonably comparable specs--and I'm not a "oh Apple Silicon sounds warmer" sort of person, amd64 is just fine with me, but AMD's high-end IGPs generally keep pace with base-model Macbooks, and start to fall behind pretty significantly when you move up to a Pro or a Max. You can add a discrete GPU, but, me, I like battery life, and mobile dGPUs are a mess of compromises anyway.

Even if you get over that hurdle, I think Windows feels bad when you're using a touchpad. They haven't cracked that one despite how long they've had to work on it. I wouldn't want to work on a Windows laptop without an external trackball; I carry one with my Mac but rarely use it unless I'm going to be working for a pretty long stretch and I want to save my hands.

Windows is still generally my pick for desktops for a lot of reasons (I don't even dual-boot Linux right now!) but this kind of sneering is weird and uncalled-for.

Macs have great hardware (as in, great display and a great touchpad - and the best thing is the computer wakes from sleep when you open the lid, every time; I don't particularly care about the M-series except that it runs super duper cool for how fast it is).

That said I've been tooting the horn that they are not good software development machines for about 2 years now (incidentally matches exactly with when I got a work macbook pro).

Glad the humor landed

I work on Windows, but mostly just use it for windowing. Almost all my work is done in WSL2 and Docker. The only things running natively are my IDE, my web browser, and slack.

The vast majority of devs use windows for dev, esp with Docker. Why wouldn’t they care about it?

Because windows has WSL? You have a 1st party directly integrated Linux already. My work laptop is a MacBook Pro and we use Docker Desktop, but for my personal work I use a desktop and run WSL/Ubuntu.

All my GUI stuff and text editors are on the windows side and the actual software all runs in docker in the Ubuntu subsystem.

Docker and WSL are complementary, and often used together. Otherwise why would anyone on Linux use Docker acc to you?

It's in the page title.

Conveniently left out of the HN link, and mentioned nowhere in the page body.

Complaining about one’s own failure to read the title of a document seems like an own goal.

It’s an obvious detail, and it’s right there in the header.

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