My guess is nerdctl and containerd.

There's also Rancher Desktop (https://rancherdesktop.io/). Supports moby and containerd; also optionally runs kubernetes.

Orbstack

I have to drop docker desktop at work and move to podman.

I'm the primary author of amalgamation of GitHub's scripts to rule them all with docker compose so my colleagues can just type `script/setup` and `script/server` (and more!) and the underlying scripts handle the rest.

Apple including this natively is nice, but I won't be a able to use this because my scripts have to work on linux and probably WSL

Migrate to Orbstack now, and get a lot of sanity back immediately. It’s a drop-in replacement, much faster, and most importantly, gets out of your way.

vminitd is the most interesting part of this.

That's my guess too... Colima, but probably doing a VM using the Virtualization framework. I'll be more curious if you can select x86 containers, or if you'll be limited to arm64/aarch64. Not that it really makes that much of a difference anymore, you can get pretty far with Linux Arm containers and VMs.