# Lima

31 Hacker News commenters recommended Lima and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free tool for running Linux virtual machines on Mac and Linux, often used as a Vagrant replacement or for quick throwaway VMs. Caveat: defaults and folder mounting may not suit everyone.

## Why people recommend it

- Works well on Mac and Linux (4 comments): "Lima works cross-platform leveraging native virtualisation or containerisation, and has some useful capabilities for using agents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48894867)) "It works great there's no reason to use distro specific tooling" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703585)) "to make it painless. Works on Mac and Linux" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201278))
- Quick, lightweight temporary VMs (4 comments): "Lima is a great tool for simple quick or for automated repeatable virtual environments!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608309)) "has worked well for spinning up (temporary) VM's quick" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48860582)) "quick headless local VMs where you can mount a folder" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183900))
- Isolated workspace for running agents (2 comments): "good old VMs can really provide the needed isolation while still having good UX" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081871)) "I regularly use a Lima VM as a VSCode remote workspace to run yolo agents in." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301485))
- Easy to automate repeatable setups (2 comments): "Lima is a great tool for simple quick or for automated repeatable virtual environments!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49608309)) "Automating this setup is also somewhat easily possible with" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46638563))

## What people warn about

- Folder mounting limited or risky (2 comments): "it does a few weird/dangerous things like mounting the entire user directory read/write" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46693395)) "I wasn't able to find a way to mount the CWD except for certain subdirectories." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47554438))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [QEMU](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qemu.md): 114 recommend
- [UTM](https://hackerapproved.com/p/utm.md): 49 recommend
- [VirtualBox](https://hackerapproved.com/p/virtualbox.md): 34 recommend
- [Vagrant](https://hackerapproved.com/p/vagrant.md): 25 recommend
- [Tart by Cirrus Labs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tart.md): 20 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Lima", https://hackerapproved.com/p/lima/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).