OrbStack

“switching to it has "magically" solved weird problems that would otherwise have consumed my actual time to debug”

“Switching to Orbstack solved the problem for me because of their memory management efforts.”

“The main gotcha I encountered with orbstack was with pulling down internally built amd64 images and trying to run them on apple silicon.”

“OrbStack’s implementation already feels lightning fast for my usage”

“Worth the cost for me because it's so well integrated and fast and docker command compatible.”

“they are license-only, closed source and macOS only oriented”

“Orbstack would on average perform the same build at 4x faster wall clock time as docker desktop”

“People have been using Orbstack, Lima and Docker long before Apple shipped first-party container tooling.”

“it feels several orders of magnitude faster and more lightweight thanks to its WSL2-like architecture”

“quickly breaks once you happen to take a less visited corner of the street”

“Orbstack if you trust them enough to not do a rug-pull”

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

“I find the Linux machines are lightweight enough that I just run Docker inside them.”

“I've been using it every day since the first releases, and it is one of the most stable and performant drop-in replacements that I've seen.”

“will overload OrbStack real quick since It seems to fallback to polling instead of listening to fs events”

“hard to justify a $96/yr license fee for something that has so many open source, free alternatives”

“isolated machines now have fine-grained settings for filesystem mounts, network isolation, SSH agent forwarding, and CPU/memory/disk limits”

“orbstack just feels right, and damn its so fast and good with resources”

“we've put a lot of effort into optimizing for small files and other common developer workloads”

“It's a highly optimized vertically integrated stack specifically for running our Linux machines and containers.”

“trust no one, nothing, use orbstack, and always operate under the assumption that your token is going to get leaked at some point”

“it feels like the only product that actually makes an effort to integrate VMs and Containers correctly and consistently into macOS”

“I also discovered zed, ghostty, and orbstack to replace vscode, iterm, and docker desktop.”

“I can't justify buying a license for every single person in my company just for something functionally equivalent but performing better.”

“OrbStack is impressive on the performance and energy efficiency fronts.”

“their everything-shares-one-kernel-and-they-don’t-give-privileged-access model falls apart as soon as you try to do anything”

“OrbStack bridges a good chunk of the Linux performance gap however.”

“I like the product a lot, but products like this need security updates at the very least.”

“the licensing tied to their free offering doesn't play nicely with corporate environments”

“I’ve been using OrbStack instead of Docker Desktop and gotta say, I’d not replace it with anything else.”

“I found it way faster on M1 and M5 and never found any compatibility issues.”

“It's fast. It does the job well. Never had an issue with it in two years.”

“OrbStack is a very compelling alternative on macOS. The GUI launches instantly due to being a Swift app and not Electron.”

“Some devs in my team are running it as a more performant alternative to Docker Desktop for Mac and they are very happy so far.”

“the filesystem they use is not POSIX compliant and causes breakage with some build systems”

“It’s faster than Virtualization.framework because it has its own hypervisor.”

“The host actually gets RAM back after bursty workloads in the container thanks to memory ballooning.”

“OrbStack provides awesome flexibility and DX/UX, w/ minimal footprint.”

“makes working w/ docker, docker-compose, linux vms, and k8s so much better”

“OrbStack has solved all the issues I had with running containers on macOS.”