OrbStack: The fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux

I work on OrbStack. Happy to answer questions!

Using Docker Desktop to compile Envoy using the standard Docker build process took somewhere in the ball park of 3 to 4 hours depending on my luck. OrbStack, on the other hand, brought it down to a bit under an hour, much closer to inline with a fresh compilation natively. Needless to say, the kinds of performance benefits I was seeing with OrbStack were game changers, and absolutely justify the cost.

Even if Docker Desktop improves to match the performance, OrbStack brings basically the whole WSL2 + Docker experience to macOS, while Docker just brings the usual Docker experience. If you get the value of WSL2 on Windows, you'll probably understand the value of OrbStack on macOS.

Sure, macOS is a UNIX environment, so a lot of the same software as Linux does run natively. However, a lot of Linux technologies don't really map to Darwin, so if you're working on Linux stuff on your macOS machine, there are plenty of use cases for virtual machines (case in point, Docker itself) not to mention simply being able to test software and build processes on Linux. The tight integration that OrbStack gives you is far better than just using Parallels or VMware. I have licenses for both at varying versions, but they're largely collecting dust on macOS, as now I basically only ever use traditional virtual machine products on macOS for the purpose of running Windows VMs.

I'm sure some people don't have any use for this: their Docker performance is fine, they don't need Linux for anything else, etc. However, for me, it's one of those things that makes macOS much more usable for development work.

Yes, I am generally not terribly impressed by colima. Of course, it's great to have as an option, but in practice I ran into issues trying to use it in various places. One issue that I am sure isn't a huge deal to most users is that as far as I could tell, colima did not support IPv6.

I didn't try multipass, but I did try Podman Desktop. It had its niceities but largely was behind even Docker Desktop.

If you really miss WSL2 on macOS, you might genuinely find OrbStack enticing. Then again, it's not free, and obviously, I don't want to give anyone false hope. For "home" use, I just run desktop Linux, using native containers and libvirt for everything. If I had to pay for a decent development experience on my personal machines, I would definitely struggle to justify a subscription charge even if it was good. On the flip side, it's easy to budget OrbStack into the equation for professional use. For your employer it's virtually a no-brainer.