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

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

#121

Post by justin_oaks »

majormajor wrote: post #119
magnio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how WSL2 makes Windows much more usable than macOS for development. None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. I have also moved towards using devcontainers for my projects whenever I can, so that I can spin up my environment on whatever machine I have, or connect to a remote one if the machine doesn't allow it.

I've never found working on WSL2 to be quite as smooth as working on Ubuntu or Fedora directly. I don't really understand why I'd keep Windows in the loop there if I was on non-Mac hardward. And I've also found WSL2 less smooth than just working on Mac natively w/o containers. Containers are a necessary evil for testing certain types of things locally, but even the free tools for working with them on Mac seem fine, t…

I've used Portainer, which works ok. It's web-based and is easy enough to run as a container itself.

My preferred UI for managing containers is Lazydocker. It's a terminal UI, so I can run it on servers too.

For the most part I just use the command line on Linux, but when I need to go through a large list of containers, images, or volumes to clean up, lazydocker is much better than the command line.

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

#122

Post by FpUser »

pjmlp wrote: post #120
saagarjha wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just listing technologies that sound kind of similar isn’t enough to actually answer the problems people want solved. The “good old days” were basically just people crying about being unable to have any of the features we have now because they don’t match up or differ in subtly different ways.

Best way to solve problems is not to have them in first place, like getting a Linux laptop for doing Linux work.

Words of wisdom. I do not really have any dev related problems with WSL2 either. Normally I develop and debug on Windows and deploy to Linux as my code compiles and works natively on both. It is mostly C++ backends lately so I suspect I am in tiny minority.

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

#123

Post by atombender »

hinkley wrote: post #109
shepherdjerred wrote: post #106

The absolute best feature that OrbStack has is debug shells. Essentially, it lets you attach to any container with all of your favorite tools already present, e.g. vim. https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/debug OrbStack is well worth the price IMO

How the hell do they do that?

Linux, at the kernel level, doesn't have any concept of a "container". What you have instead are namespaces. File systems, process lists, networking etc. are all namespaced, and you can set these up "a la carte".

For example, you can create a new process that has as its file system root /home/blah. It will see every process in the system, it can do networking, etc. — but "ls" can only show the files under /home/blah, which appears as /. Inside this process, you can't see any files above this directory.

A Docker container is simply a process which has set all its namespaces in such a way as to isolate it from others.

"Entering" a Docker container is done by setting up your namespace to be the same as that of the container. For example, you can create a new process (a shell, for example) that is a normal process in every way — full access to the root file system and networking and so on — but has the process tree root as the container. The process will see only the processes inside the container.

You can do this on Linux today using the nsenter [1] tool. (This is also a way to create simple namespaced processes without Docker.) This allows a mix of namespaces; you can enter the container's namespaces but also retain the ability to run tools that aren't available inside the container.

In short, I assume the OrbStack debug command does the exact same thing. It's coincidentally the same concept as an ephemeral container on Kubernetes.

[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/nsenter.1.html

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

#124

Post by jchw »

talldayo wrote: post #113
jchw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. 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 multi…

Imagine paying a subscription service to use something slower than QEMU. Yikes...

OK, I'll try to imagine that.

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

#125

Post by nyrikki »

pjmlp wrote: post #97
AYBABTME wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you make containers in Darwin?

Yes, the macOS way, with Virtualization Framework.

The insane stability of the Linux ABI is partially what makes containers useful.

The fact that containers can reliably depend on the ABI contract, thus placing almost any clib they wish they want inside the container is fairly unique.

That extreme stability of that contract is awesome for namespace decoupling. Unfortunately Apple and Microsoft do not have such stable interfaces.

Remember containers are just namespaces.

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

#126

Post by gigatexal »

jchw wrote: post #10
magnio wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how WSL2 makes Windows much more usable than macOS for development. None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. I have also moved towards using devcontainers for my projects whenever I can, so that I can spin up my environment on whatever machine I have, or connect to a remote one if the machine doesn't allow it.

> None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. 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 multi…

Lima ssh and you have WSL more or less. What are people missing?

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

#127

Post by rfoo »

kdrag0n wrote: post #73
rfoo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, is it possible to add a virtual machine mode to OrbStack? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41423667 for why. I'm okay with most (or all) nice integrations unavailable. Basically I want a true UTM replacement, the one I can run my own kernel.

Sorry, no plans for that. That vertical integration is a key part of OrbStack — it's not just for nice extras/integrations.

Fair enough. Thanks for answering.

Well, as someone who still lives in stone age (I guess?) I always run headless Linux VM on Windows/macOS and have all my projects/files inside VM so I unfortunately don't use your Docker/Kubernetes features, and fast file sharing is a nice to have.

But, you and your team seems to really care about client virtualization on macOS, more so than Apple. So while being a niche, I sincerely hope you may consider this sometimes later.

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

#128

Post by pxc »

pjmlp wrote: post #97
AYBABTME wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you make containers in Darwin?

Yes, the macOS way, with Virtualization Framework.

Besides the way Apple puts a hard limit on the number of those you can spin up, don't they also virtualize hardware and run their own kernels? That's just not the kind of virtualization that containers are.

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

#129

Post by Animats »

suprjami wrote: post #61
Animats wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I'd like to have something that runs Docker images on desktop but doesn't require a privileged daemon, users, groups, etc.

Is Podman Desktop available on your platform? Podman is rootless containers done correctly.

Thanks. I will try that.

(I want to run Open Drone Map on Ubuntu desktop. ODM is a collection of image processing software from OpenCV and similar sources loosely bolted together to merge aerial photos from drones into a 3D model. So it has the install from hell unless containerized. ODM had a snap version, but the snap maintainer left the project.)

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

#130

Post by jchw »

gigatexal wrote: post #126
jchw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the free options (colima, multipass, etc) I've tried on macOS are as smooth, though OrbStack might be it. 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 multi…

Lima ssh and you have WSL more or less. What are people missing?

For me, the primary draw of OrbStack is that it is very fast, which matters for me, as I wind up doing a lot of compute-bound things in containers. The fact that it provides a great dev experience similar to WSL2 is just a bonus.
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