141–150 of 161 posts
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Can you make containers in Darwin?
Yes, the macOS way, with Virtualization Framework.
I don't generally prefer to work on macOS, but if I wind up using macOS to do work, I often find myself working a lot on things in virtual machines and containers. 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 comp…
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.
As long as you use VS Code. Using another editor through the network share isnt great and runs into all sorts of other compatibility issues otherwise. I've also ran into a bunch of networking quirks with WSL2 + Docker that were frustrating to sort out.
WSL2 makes *nix development on Windows great, but I would still much prefer to just be in a native environment.
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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.
what's the magic sauce that makes it so fast? custom vm engine? using apple's HVF? firecracker vm from AWS?
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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.
I used Linux workstations for most of my entire career, at nearly every job. Seems like around 2018 something changed and now I'm going to have to fight to get a desktop that I feel vaguely productive under for every single job I get going forward.
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Because Windows users are unlikely to care about Docker and Linux people don’t pay for stuff
The vast majority of devs use windows for dev, esp with Docker. Why wouldn’t they care about it?
All my GUI stuff and text editors are on the windows side and the actual software all runs in docker in the Ubuntu subsystem.
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It's in the page title.
Conveniently left out of the HN link, and mentioned nowhere in the page body.
It’s an obvious detail, and it’s right there in the header.
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Which other platform would you expect it to be for?
It advertises as an alternative to Docker Desktop which is for Windows and Linux as well.
There's little point in running Docker Desktop on Linux because you don't need either (a) or (b) on Linux (nor the equivalents for Podman or your favorite Kubernetes distribution). You get the overhead and annoyances of running all your containers under a second OS running under your first one for what— an Electron GUI? I guess it's something if you're really worried about container escapes during local development. But it doesn't generally seem worth it to me.
The other thing OrbStack integrates is letting you spin up many 'machines' that have fast startup and efficiently share resources with each other. But OrbStack achieves that by running long-lived system containers on a single guest VM. If you're on Linux, you can just do that directly, just like the Docker containers, using the same tools¹ OrbStack uses under the hood. The CLI for Incus (a descendant if lxd, associated with Linux containers and LXC) is really pretty nice, too.
OrbStack has a lot of polish and performance optimizations that make it really competitive against other tools like it. There's lots of thoughtful touches in it beyond the basic ideas outlined above. But I wouldn't recommend any tool in its class to someone running a Linux desktop/laptop/workstation who wants to use containers in development. Just use the real things directly and learn the normal, universal CLIs.
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My (somewhat sarcastic) comment was just that Apple hardware is more expensive than Linux/Windows hardware. If you use Linux then I would say the docker experience is quite good. I wonder if Linux hardware was an option; seems odd to require running stuff under docker but also force people to use macbooks...
Some places don't allow it due to MDM not being available/beta/untested for linux, althogh that has changed quite a bit over the past couple of years.
> Why don't we support Linux? Because we don't support Linux!
runaround. When a company that mandates MDM chooses to buy an MDM software that lacks Linux support, that choice is the choice not to support Linux on developer machines.
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The vast majority of devs use windows for dev, esp with Docker. Why wouldn’t they care about it?
Because windows has WSL? You have a 1st party directly integrated Linux already. My work laptop is a MacBook Pro and we use Docker Desktop, but for my personal work I use a desktop and run WSL/Ubuntu. All my GUI stuff and text editors are on the windows side and the actual software all runs in docker in the Ubuntu subsystem.