macOS Container Machines • Hacker News Board

Re: macOS Container Machines

#211

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:33 AM UTC

bel8 wrote: post #146

vehemenz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but serious developers don’t think this way at all.

For server side, which I believe is the context here, Linux and open source are king. Even Microsoft gave up on Windows and just runs Linux most things except niche cases. Heck, even SQL Server which is expensive piece of machinery got ported to Linux and that's the default target now in their docs. With that said, one can't deny Apple's success on the b2c side of things so it feels wrong to call their strategy a fai…

Except the cloud isn't open source, the ones that matter to developers that is.

Which is why so many projects get burned with their license choices.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#212

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:35 AM UTC

riffic wrote: post #103

tw04 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the alternative? They gave up the server market a decade ago and before that they barely actually supported it. If they were to support darwin containers, what would be the point? Literally nobody would build to it, Linux won.

> Literally nobody would build to it because nobody does ci/cd against macOS or iOS apps right?

They already support this scenario with XCode Cloud, it is only a market for those that don't want to pay Apple for it.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#213

Post by dchest » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

llimllib wrote: post #31

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

Did you use their volumes for node_modules or a shared dir? I mounted the whole project directory (with node_modules) inside the container and it seems to work fine (MBA M1 8 GB RAM).

Re: macOS Container Machines

#214

Post by hnlmorg » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #208

qalmakka wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any older folk here remembers when NT was the Cool New Thing (TM) and it had by design support to multiple subsystems plopped over the NT API, and Win32 was just one of them alongside POSIX (Interix) and OS/2? There was even a _very short_ time span when Interix was actually usable (it was extremely short though)

Yes, the only reason I cared for Linux in first place was that the POSIX support wasn't that good. I am convinced that if POSIX subsystem was UNIX serious, GNU/Linux would never taken off on PC, and the whole would be divided between SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix and Windows NT.

There were already better free options than Linux when Linux first started gaining traction.

The reason Linux grew in the 90s was because it was part of the hacker culture. Not because better options didn’t exist.

Kids liked the fact that Linux was a free-for-all, anything-goes, platform. It wasn’t stuffy like Unix and it wasn’t proprietary like Windows.

Then those kids grew up and became decision makers themselves. And we started to see Linux replace FreeBSD and commercial Unixes.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#215

Post by baq » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:42 AM UTC

mpeg wrote: post #120

blahgeek wrote: post #10

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

I like orbstack in theory, but I find it hard to justify a $96/yr license fee for something that has so many open source, free alternatives. As it is, I’d rather use podman or colima

The alternatives are all broken in some ways is the answer, including the official paid docker enterprise.

Personally I’d rather the company provisioned me MacBook hardware with Linux. Unless Fable or some other ai ports asahi properly to modern hardware I expect to retire before this is possible, orbstack is the next best thing, available today.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#216

Post by phinnaeus » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:42 AM UTC

rawland wrote: post #193

phinnaeus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postman Desktop too

You mean Podman Desktop?

Yes, thank you iOS autocorrect.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#217

Post by gempir » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

blahgeek wrote: post #10

OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise

I just wish bind mounts would be more performant/native. I get that this is probably impossible, and probably also sucks on Linux, haven't tried.

But like having containers that need file watchers like vite dev server, or frankenphp in watch mode will overload OrbStack real quick since It seems to fallback to polling instead of listening to fs events.

So I'm stuck running vite dev servers and the like on the host.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#218

Post by rahkiin » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:47 AM UTC

cromka wrote: post #181

So essentially both macOS and Windows now heavily support developing using Linux on them. They can't more openly admit that they are no match for Linux in that area. There's some clever advertising in it for Linux, if Linux was advertising.

I’d argue they both admin that Linux servers are the target for a lot of applications to run on. Not to develop on.

Re: macOS Container Machines

#219

Post by bogantech » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:54 AM UTC

timsneath wrote: post #11

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

> filesystem mounting

How is this different to bind mounts

Re: macOS Container Machines

#220

Post by gf000 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 6:55 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #210

Gigachad wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine existed before Proton, Valve made it better but the project doesn't rely on Valve. Currently Linux is the best gaming experience. Zero bloat or nagware, everything just works. It's just ironic Wine/Proton ended up being the best platform for gaming on Linux. I don't think anyone expected it to run so well with virtually no performance impact. Now with the Fex project, it might end up that running Windows games o…

The best gaming experience are Switch, PlayStation, XBox, iOS, Android, the very definition of everything just works, and no kernel drivers to worry about.

You just listed concrete hardware (with the exception of Android). That's a category error, of course a fixed hardware with specialized software will have less inconsistencies.