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> None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. Yes, I am generally not terribly impressed
by jchw 2y ago
> None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it.
Yes, I am generally not terribly impressed by colima. Of course, it's great to have as an option, but in practice I ran into issues trying to use it in various places. One issue that I am sure isn't a huge deal to most users is that as far as I could tell, colima did not support IPv6.
I didn't try multipass, but I did try Podman Desktop. It had its niceities but largely was behind even Docker Desktop.
If you really miss WSL2 on macOS, you might genuinely find OrbStack enticing. Then again, it's not free, and obviously, I don't want to give anyone false hope. For "home" use, I just run desktop Linux, using native containers and libvirt for everything. If I had to pay for a decent development experience on my personal machines, I would definitely struggle to justify a subscription charge even if it was good. On the flip side, it's easy to budget OrbStack into the equation for professional use. For your employer it's virtually a no-brainer.
- talldayo 2y agoImagine paying a subscription service to use something slower than QEMU. Yikes...
- jchw 2y agoOK, I'll try to imagine that.
- gigatexal 2y agoLima ssh and you have WSL more or less. What are people missing?
- jchw 2y agoFor me, the primary draw of OrbStack is that it is very fast, which matters for me, as I wind up doing a lot of compute-bound things in containers. The fact that it provides a great dev experience similar to WSL2 is just a bonus.
- gigatexal 2y agowhat's the magic sauce that makes it so fast? custom vm engine? using apple's HVF? firecracker vm from AWS?
- jchw 2y agoI think the main bottleneck in most macOS virtualization solutions winds up being I/O related. Docker Desktop and OrbStack both have custom solutions for bidirectional filesystem bridging and network integration, but for me OrbStack is much faster. OrbStack also can choose between using Apple Rosetta and qemu usermode for running Intel software on Apple Silicon.