Could this be an analogue of WSL on windows but for MacOS?
macOS Container Machines
331–340 of 457 posts
Re: macOS Container Machines
#332Will this come to MacOS 27? LE: nevermind, it is already on MacOS. Did not read everything.
Available from 15
Re: macOS Container Machines
#333To 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
> container runs containers differently. Using the open source Containerization package, it runs a lightweight VM for each container that you create. This approach has the following properties:
> - Security: Each container has the isolation properties of a full VM, using a minimal set of core utilities and dynamic libraries to reduce resource utilization and attack surface.
> - Privacy: When sharing host data using container, you mount only necessary data into each VM. With a shared VM, you need to mount all data that you may ever want to use into the VM, so that it can be mounted selectively into containers.
> -Performance: Containers created using container require less memory than full VMs, with boot times that are comparable to containers running in a shared VM.
More details, including technical limitations (they’re looking for bug reports and contributions): “Container: Technical Overview” https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
Re: macOS Container Machines
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in my day you to to download a couple GB worth of cygwin, and that wasn't an actual environment, basically just a GNU toolchain compiled for windows. But it got you like....grep and bash and stuff that ran natively on windows which was kinda cool.
what do you mean? that's still the only way to work as a human in windows. wsl1 almost replaced it, but obviously they scrapped it. if you must use windows, it's because you will compile for windows. so you install MSYS, which is a linux distro-ish compiled native for windows. and do your work. wsl2 (and this apple thing) is just a meme. if you're working in it, you're better of just installing Linux or ssh'ing to a…
> wsl2 (and this apple thing) is just a meme. if you're working in it, you're better of just installing Linux or ssh'ing to a server.
Many enterprises allow windows only so your way into Linux is via WSL2
Re: macOS Container Machines
#335So 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.
Linux also can't openly admit that it's no match for macOS/Windows on the desktop, which is why we have this hybrid situation - macOS/Windows desktops running Linux VMs
This is a tired cliché. Today, a modern Linux desktop like KDE Plasma just works and more importantly, gets out of your way unlike obnoxious MacOS and Windows. Aside of that you get the most advanced OS in the world where the thing being discussed here is a decade old.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Which ones? BSD was tied in a lawsuit that left doubts on its future. Minix was a toy OS for university teachings. Coherent was commercial. Nothing else was there on the PC market.
386BSD and its derivatives (eg FreeBSD) weren’t really attacked by SCO like other UNIXes were. In fact SCO filed more lawsuits against Linux than they did (for example) FreeBSD.
FreeBSD was also used heavily in the late 90s in ISPs and similar domains.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux also can't openly admit that it's no match for macOS/Windows on the desktop, which is why we have this hybrid situation - macOS/Windows desktops running Linux VMs
This is a tired cliché. Today, a modern Linux desktop like KDE Plasma just works and more importantly, gets out of your way unlike obnoxious MacOS and Windows. Aside of that you get the most advanced OS in the world where the thing being discussed here is a decade old.
The issue with Linux isn’t the software, it’s the hardware. Apple Silicon Macs are still the nicest laptop hardware by a huge margin. All the Linux-native options are, at best, “okay”.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#338OrbStack 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.
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Re: macOS Container Machines
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Containers only got so popular as a tool for developers to make developing/deploying easier. If you want to use them as a security layer that is a completely different goal and has many highly dangerous pitfalls [1]. Just last week there was a post where people were shocked how an AI agent used docker to bypass sudo on a system. I'd imagine this could happen to most people who installed docker. So if you want to use…
> Just last week there was a post where people were shocked how an AI agent used docker to bypass sudo on a system. This was due to implicitly granting the LLM access to the host docker daemon, which has superuser privileges, not due to a "container breakout". That's arguably a very different scenario, but of course both are worth considering. > So if you want to use containers for anything but easier development, yo…
>without granting them additional privileges such as CAP_NET_ADMIN and without write-bind-mounting sensitive host directories into the container, offer a reasonable security boundary compared to the counterfactua
There's much more to it than that if you check out the link above. Misconfiguring a container is the 2026 version of misconfiguring FTP and MYSQL in the 90s. I.e. most users don't even know how they are asking to get rooted.
Re: macOS Container Machines
#340Why it is important ? We have Docker for containers, right ?