It's well worth it its much more than a gui for it supports running k8s locally, managing custom vm instances, resource monitoring of containers, built in local domain name support with ssl mycontainer.orb, a debug shell that gives you ability to install packages that are not available in the image by default, much better and automated volume mounting and view every container in finder, ability to query logs, an amazing ui, plus it is much, much faster and more resource efficient.

The above features really do make it worth it especially when using existing services that have complicated failure logs or are resource intensive like redis, postgres, livekit, etc or you have a lot of ports running and want to call your service without having to worry about remembering port numbers or complicated docker network configuration.

Check it out https://docs.orbstack.dev/

I tried all the DD alternatives (on macOS) and I think OrbStack is the easiest to use and least invasive of them all.

But it is not cross-platform, so we settled on Podman instead, which came (distant) second in my tests. The UI is horrible, IMO but hey… compromises.

I use OrbStack for my personal stuff, though.

orbstack is absolutely amazing. not only the docker side works much better than docker desktop but their lightweight linux vms are just beyond great.

i've been using an archlinux vm for everything development over the past year and a half and i couldn't be happier.

Yes, Orbstack is significantly better than Docker Desktop, and probably also better than any other Docker replacement out there right now (for macOS), if you aren't bothered by the (reasonable) pricing.

It costs about $100/year per seat for commercial use, IIRC. But it is significantly faster than Docker Desktop at literally everything, has a way better UI, and a bunch of QoL features that are nice. Plus Linux virtualization that is both better and (repeating on this theme) significantly more performant than Parallels or VMWare Fusion or UTM.

Been using it for a year or so now and it’s amazing. Noticeably faster than DD and the UI isn’t Electron or whatever’s going on there.