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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

If you’re on macOS, then Orbstack is a nice alternative to Docker Desktop

(I’m not affiliated with Orbstack)

I would love to use it but I loathe subscriptions, especially for something I’d need work to pay for. I would happily pay a one-time $50-100 and get a perpetual license so I don’t have to deal with the headache…

IMO if Docker is important to you then Orbstack is worth it.

The debug shell feature alone makes it better than any alternative, and hopefully that subscription money is put towards more unique features.

https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/debug

if i understood that page, debug shell is... "exec" with a nicer .bashprofile and injected text editor binary???

It's installing additional packages which may not have been included in your base image.

> Debug Shell works by injecting a debugging environment using: > NixOS for a large package collection, and flexibility with filesystem paths

https://orbstack.dev/blog/debug-shell?utm_source=relnotes

It's an alternative to https://docs.docker.com/reference/cli/docker/debug/, which is also a paid feature.

Debugging slim or distroless images is quite the pain, so a tool like this is worth it if you're frequently working on such images.

Orbstack is wicked good. I love it. I compile to 4 platforms with it (Ubuntu/Mac x x86_64/arm) and it's the fastest emu/docker thing.

Of course Orbstack is fast, it uses LXD, not actual VMs. In fact, Orbstack on Mac is what made me switch to LXD (Incus) on Linux to replace Docker and virt-manager.

Wrong, Orbstack does use VMs.

https://docs.orbstack.dev/architecture

> OrbStack uses a lightweight Linux virtual machine with a shared kernel to minimize overhead and save resources, similar to WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

No. It uses a VM to virtualize a Linux kernel running LXD containers. Those are not virtual machines.

https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/461#issuecomment...

The VM you just referred to is a virtual machine, that’s what VM stands for.

I think you forgot how this thread got started:

> If you’re on macOS, then Orbstack is a nice alternative to Docker Desktop

We’re talking about running OCI (“Docker compatible”) images. The page you just linked to makes it apparent that you are talking about something orthogonal: OrbStack’s “machines” feature (https://docs.orbstack.dev/machines/).

The original topic is that OrbStack’s support for Docker containers is fast (implied: faster than Docker for Desktop), which cannot be explained by the lack of a VM, as both use a Linux VM to run one or more Docker containers.

lxd supports containers and virtual machines

colima is also good https://www.swyx.io/running-docker-without-docker-desktop

also no affiliation and have not tried orbstack

Colima offers the best experience for docker alternative. LIMA offers the equivalent of WSL, where both docker and podman are supported. I like LIMA a lot as I deal with both, but COLIMA rocks for simplicity. I think COLIMA + Container Desktop are perfect replacement on mac for traditional Docker Desktop users.

Colima has been great to support x86 images on Apple Silicon like OracleDB 19, instead of building arm64 images.

The flexibility of container runtimes and host architecture (via QEMU) has proven useful.

Yeah, I use this to support extremely old C++ project on x86_64 docker images and it's tolerable if not speedy.

Switched to it, and paid for the license. I agree with others about not wanting to get subcriptioned to death, but I feel like it's worth $8/month.

I've also used Colima, and if Orbstack wasn't an option, I'd be happy to keep using it.

It's nice, but only for personal use.

Be aware that you need a license if you use it at work.

As is true with a lot of developer tooling. Including Docker Desktop itself.

Another enthusiastic +1 for OrbStack. It's fantastic.

GPU support would be a real benefit, but for anything not needing that, Orbstack's become my strong preference.

Is there anything you can actually _do_ with the Apple GPUs outside of macOS? I know the Asahi Linux person was working on a driver for it, but is it in a useful state?

Yes. In fact it's accelerated and supports OpenGL 4.6 while macOS tops at OpenGL 4.1, and really mostly only supports Metal nowadays. With Asahi you can use OpenGL and Vulkan.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/asahi-linux-projects...

Oh neat! Thanks for the tip!

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