Tangentially related but I wish people would stop recommending nix-env and just in general ad-hoc installation on using Nix. It defeats the purpose of using Nix in the first place. If you want to try a package out, there’s "nix shell" or "nix-shell -p" if you’re not using flakes. If you want to install a package you should put it in your configuration instead.
Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#12How does this compare to Podman or using Docker directly? Can this be used to create something like Distrobox for macOS?
Speaking to Mac usage specifically here.
I’ve used all three and went with Colima + Goland/Pycharm’s docker integration for the UI. Easy to install, integrations tend to just work without fiddling.
Podman is honestly overrated. Getting it integrated with other tooling is a pain and no it’s not as simple as renaming podman to docker. K8S side works pretty ok. I didn’t like podman desktop.
Docker Engine requires docker desktop on Mac so if you’re using one you’re using the other.
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#13I have had better luck with orbstack ( https://orbstack.dev )
It's a bit disappointing that OrbStack is not open source, but it works really well.
In my experience (co)lima was already an improvement over Docker Desktop in terms of reliability and background resource usage, but OrbStack is even more lightweight. I also do a bit of low-level networking development and Docker Desktop was rewriting some fields of the IP packets (besides NAT translation) which was annoying. It works seamlessly here.
It still has the same VM memory usage issue as other tools (Linux page cache taking more and more memory over time and not releasing it to the host), but they claim it will work correctly once a bug in Virtualization.framework is fixed: https://twitter.com/OrbStack/status/1645782250116505600
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#14Colima has been an awesome replacement of Docker Desktop for me on Mac. It seems to run light, doesn't prompt for updates on system launch, in fact doesn't even auto launch on startup, have to manually do colima start. And docker just works flawlessly. Kudos to the team who built this. Best part is this nifty little command that allows for auto complete script generation for the required shell, try it:
colima completion zsh
Using 14" M1 Pro Mac, experience may vary on different hardware I suppose.
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#15How does this compare to Podman or using Docker directly? Can this be used to create something like Distrobox for macOS?
I’ve had a weird bug with podman machine that moved me towards Colima: the vm will just randomly freeze and not come back to life until you restart it. Also podman machine doesn’t use the virtualization framework on MacOS, preventing the usage of virtiofs, which means volume mounts are super slow.
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#16I have had better luck with orbstack ( https://orbstack.dev )
It's a bit disappointing that OrbStack is not open source, but it works really well. In my experience (co)lima was already an improvement over Docker Desktop in terms of reliability and background resource usage, but OrbStack is even more lightweight. I also do a bit of low-level networking development and Docker Desktop was rewriting some fields of the IP packets (besides NAT translation) which was annoying. It work…
Great to hear, thanks for sharing :)
Here's to hoping that Apple fixes the underlying memory bug in macOS 14. Being able to ship dynamic memory would be amazing!
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#17How does this compare to Lando?
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#18Personally I'll be sticking to Rancher Desktop[1]
It's backed by SuSE so it's going to be supported and not dependent on a single maintainer.
From my perspective, the last thing I want to do is waste my time debugging my container runtime, I just want to get on with the job.
It's based also around K3s, which is well suited to desktop environments. The list goes on...
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#19Personally I'll be sticking to Rancher Desktop[1] It's backed by SuSE so it's going to be supported and not dependent on a single maintainer. From my perspective, the last thing I want to do is waste my time debugging my container runtime, I just want to get on with the job. It's based also around K3s, which is well suited to desktop environments. The list goes on... [1] https://rancherdesktop.io
Does it work with Podman?
Does it have support for docker-compose files?
Re: Colima: Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup
#20I really like .devContainers in VSCode, but I really don't like Docker. I use Podman on Fedora which switched to cgroups v2 a long time ago, and while it works ok almost some of the time, it's inconsistent when sharing my devcontainer setup with my macOS colleagues.
What are people's experiences running devcontainers with Colima? The repo suggests that it _should_ work, but I'd be curious to hear subjective experiences.