We mainly use the VM to provide a well-known and tested environment for Kubernetes to run in. Running inside a Docker container on Linux would have similar bene

We mainly use the VM to provide a well-known and tested environment for Kubernetes to run in. Running inside a Docker container on Linux would have similar benefits, but there are still a few bugs with running some of the Kubernetes components inside containers. We'll probably add a "native" option for Linux at some point. See this issue: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/issues/261 https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/issues/261 for a little more conversation. Disclosure: I work at Google, on Minikube.