I have been using colima as a lightweight alternative to docker desktop and the likes of it for almost two years. Looking at the comparison provided on the orbstack website (https://docs.orbstack.dev/compare/colima) it seems to be not very accurate or at least requires some explanations/clarifications.

For instance: Low power/CPU usage is advertised as non-existent in colima. This is simply not true. Based on my perception I can't tell whether colima VM is running or not. Unlike docker desktop, especially with kubernetes on. Does not drain my battery, does not bog my CPU down unless I intentionally spin up something resource hungry.

ease of use/performance: not everyone needs GUI. colima is fine UX/devex wise with fast startup times. What does "fast network" even mean?

Linux machines/distros: not a fair comparison. colima stands for "containers on Lima" where lima is "linux machines" on macos. I.e. if you want arbitrary vms, use lima directly. colima is specifically built to spin up docker/containerd/k3s vms.

containers/kubernetes networking: this is opinionated and depends on a specific use case. In general I prefer the idea when my local kubernetes setup looks like the end production setup in the sense that I cannot mess up much with networking, access clusterip services directly from localhost because clusterip services are supposed to be accessible from inside the cluster itself, not from outside. loadbalancer IP is accessible through NodePorts anyways.

containers file access: there are plenty of ways you can access files in containers and images. But again, probably there are people who like to browse the guts of a kubernetes node in MacOS Finder. When it comes to files and networking I want to be able to re-use my toolbox used for dealing with remote kubernetes clusters and docker/containerd instances to my local ones. Creating a special case with convenient but non-standard ways to access files as if they were part of my host filesystem may be good for someone, but wrong for someone else because at times when something goes wrong this special case will work as an excuse for "works on my machine".

Please take the above as my personal experience. And I am in the herd of those who tend to keep everything as minimal and bare as possible with as much standartization/ lack of deviations across different environments as possible. Came to colima after years of minikube just because minikube's experience was no longer good with apple silicon. And there must be a very strong reason to switch to something new when what you have already is good enough.

Also, when it comes to GUI, what about Rancher Desktop?