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To clarify a few comments here: this is not only OCI containers: container machines add support for persistence and filesystem mounting, making container machines a great lightweight Linux environment for developers using macOS. More details here: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389
Is this new? I thought we had this already In my testing (iirc) filesystem performance was not good enough to be usable with node/rust dev where lots of small files get stat-ed update: what's new is the `container machine` subcommand. I went to test it out, but container failed to run at all for me: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/1681
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Ah, the Darwin/BSD Subsystem for Linux.
Not quite, it’s still a VM. And while it supports virtio balloon for growing RAM, it doesn’t yet support releasing that RAM back to the host. And there isn’t a convenient way to shrink the sparse disk images as they grow yet, either.
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Not quite, it’s still a VM. And while it supports virtio balloon for growing RAM, it doesn’t yet support releasing that RAM back to the host. And there isn’t a convenient way to shrink the sparse disk images as they grow yet, either.
Isn't the Windows subsystem for Linux (the reference there) also a VM?
OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise
(OrbStack dev here.) Instead of Virtualization.framework, we have a custom Rust virtualization stack with custom devices and protocols for things like filesystem sharing. It's a highly optimized vertically integrated stack specifically for running our Linux machines and containers. Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else…
Wow, missed this when reviewing OrbStack. I assumed that you just used Containerization and therefore would have the same limitation.
Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.
Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.
OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise
AFAICT it's pretty similar.
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This is incorrect macOS is fundamentally more secure than desktop Linux operating systems and it isn't particularly close. No amount of Linux hardening will get a system even close to an M-chip Mac. Software insecurities aside, desktop Linux OS systems have almost none of the hardware-backed security benefits that Macs do.
At some point, lack of security becomes a feature. A fully secure, locked-down, T2 attested macOS is able to be controlled not just by Apple, but by increasingly evil governments, with no recourse available to users.