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Comment by mstade | Hacker News Reader

I replaced my Docker usage entirely with OrbStack[1] a few months ago, and have had zero issues with it so far. Great product that I happily pay a license for.

My usage is fairly basic though and I'm sure mileage varies, but for my basic web dev setup it's been perfect.

[1]: https://orbstack.dev/

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orbstack is just a vm provider for docker on mac, colima offers the same features without a ui and is a great open replacement but as neither supports podman both are not really relevant to the podman discussion.

> orbstack is just a vm provider for docker on mac

”just” is a big statement here. Performance between colima and OrbStack are from different planets.

Apple just released their own runtime so that is also worth inspecting.

can you back that claim up? i see a huge difference between orbstack and docker desktop but colima and orbstack use afaik the same technology and the performance was near identical in my tests. (Though you need to change the colima settings to vz and virtiofs)

> (Though you need to change the colima settings to vz and virtiofs)

I think I have just used the defaults. The difference was huge in regular use. E.g. simple test to upgrade OS packages and time that.

I haven't used OrbStack in a while but would you say Colima or OrbStack is faster? At least on Intel Mac Colima is for me way better than Docker. Also better than Podman in terms of compatibility, although I had to switch back to Docker Desktop since I need full compat.

You know someone has NOT used OrbStack when they just think all they have to offer is the UI. In fact, I barely use the UI, I just see the icon in the Menu Bar, from then on I just love the performance, feels almost like being back on Linux.

The UI of OrbStack is probably one the biggest features, so a replacement without the UI doesn't make a ton of sense for most people that like OrbStack.

Podman has this built-in, and there is an optional UI called Podman Desktop.

It's more general than that, closer to WSL. I usually use Podman Desktop for container stuff, but I like OrbStack for managing Linux VMs. It has some really slick integrations and it performs very, very well.

> but as neither supports podman both are not really relevant to the podman discussion

FWIW lima (upon which COlima was built) ships with "boot me up a podman": <https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/v1.2.1/templates/podman...> and <https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/v1.2.1/templates/podman...>

I can't think of any stellar reason why colima couldn't also support it, since they even go out of their way to support Incus as a runtime, but I don't currently have the emotional energy to prosecute such a PR

I've replaced my OrbStack usage entirely with Podman Desktop and have zero issues with it, unlike with OrbStack.

In particular the 1TB VM disk image OrbStack uses wreaks havok with deduplicating backups. Their disk cache also caused me hours of debugging why my assets weren't up-to-date.

Admittedly the OrbStack GUI is super snappy tho.

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