Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaimehrubiks | Hacker News Reader

Will this be able to replace docker desktop an equivalents, removing the expensive Linux VM that runs alongside them?

My first thought as well, docker desktop overhead is pretty bad, would be awesome to see this land natively in DD. By my estimate this could happen, seeing as Docker has historically tried to improve performance but quickly had to accept platform limitations… would only be natural to settle DD over to containers

Well, you can avoid the Docker Desktop tax by not running Docker Desktop. colima is a perfectly usable implementation of Docker for macOS, without the bloat of Docker Desktop.

That said, colima still has the expensive VM that upthread is mentioning.

OrbStack is great also

Postman Desktop too

You mean Podman Desktop?

Yes, thank you iOS autocorrect.

until they remove the free tier and raise prices, once their user base is sufficiently reliant on it.

I had no idea they have a free tier. I've been paying for a couple of years and it's been so worth it.

I agree, it’s so much better than Docker Desktop, Podman, and Colima. And not just by a small margin, it feels several orders of magnitude faster and more lightweight thanks to its WSL2-like architecture.

It mostly removes the big shared background VM and replaces it with smaller, more isolated Apple-native VMs.

I did an experiment migrating my Podman workload to Apple's container @ https://gist.github.com/jmonster/39e14585e107dbf990a90966c0f...

TL;DR reduces ram/storage usage; minimizes it's existence

How does that work, realistically?

> Memory defaults to half of host memory

That's the most expensive part of the whole transaction, b/c AFAIK, RAM is then dedicated to the VM. It can be swapped out, I suppose, but that's not great.

CGamesPlay said above its balloon memory so it won’t use all that memory by default, but it can’t release balloon memory yet.

Nice, thanks for this. My plan is to swap over to Apple's containers for local dev, and keep using podman quadlets in production.

This explicitly provides a Linux VM, which seems hard to do without providing a Linux VM.

The use case is actually the opposite of what you seem to want (i.e. running Linux containers on macOS without a Linux VM); this uses a Linux-based container implementation of macOS to provide a long-lived Linux VM that looks more like a VM itself than a container.

Linux VMs on doesn't have to be expensive!

Others here mention it and I’m a new convert to Colima.

The pain of working around Docker Desktop is bad.

That sure would be nice. I seem to rm -rf ~/.colima every few days.

this is more like toolbox/distrobox equivalent for MacOs, but running in individual VMs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com