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

For instance: Low power/CPU usage is advertised as non-existent in colima. This is simply not true. Based on my perception I can't tell whether colima VM is running or not. Unlike docker desktop, especially with kubernetes on. Does not drain my battery, does not bog my CPU down unless I intentionally spin up something resource hungry.

ease of use/performance: not everyone needs GUI. colima is fine UX/devex wise with fast startup times. What does "fast network" even mean?

Linux machines/distros: not a fair comparison. colima stands for "containers on Lima" where lima is "linux machines" on macos. I.e. if you want arbitrary vms, use lima directly. colima is specifically built to spin up docker/containerd/k3s vms.

containers/kubernetes networking: this is opinionated and depends on a specific use case. In general I prefer the idea when my local kubernetes setup looks like the end production setup in the sense that I cannot mess up much with networking, access clusterip services directly from localhost because clusterip services are supposed to be accessible from inside the cluster itself, not from outside. loadbalancer IP is accessible through NodePorts anyways.

containers file access: there are plenty of ways you can access files in containers and images. But again, probably there are people who like to browse the guts of a kubernetes node in MacOS Finder. When it comes to files and networking I want to be able to re-use my toolbox used for dealing with remote kubernetes clusters and docker/containerd instances to my local ones. Creating a special case with convenient but non-standard ways to access files as if they were part of my host filesystem may be good for someone, but wrong for someone else because at times when something goes wrong this special case will work as an excuse for "works on my machine".

Please take the above as my personal experience. And I am in the herd of those who tend to keep everything as minimal and bare as possible with as much standartization/ lack of deviations across different environments as possible. Came to colima after years of minikube just because minikube's experience was no longer good with apple silicon. And there must be a very strong reason to switch to something new when what you have already is good enough.

Also, when it comes to GUI, what about Rancher Desktop?

That being said, it wasn't always been smooth sailing. Under the hood, OrbStack uses an 8TB sparse disk image, which doesn't play nice with most backup software.

https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/29

It caused me problems with Backblaze, but the Github issues for this show that it also breaks all sorts of backup software, including tarsnap, Druva inSync, Carbon Cloner, iDrive, Carbonite, and even Time Machine itself when formatted with HFS+, apparently.

The official position for a year was "won't fix", because it's an Apple technology, and backup software should support that. While technically correct, realistically, sparse image backup support was not very widespread at the time. (I have no idea about now, since I gave up trying to back up my Orbstack image with my whole disk backup.)

I like Orbstack, but I wish the devs had moved to exclude the disk image from backups immediately, instead of arguing with people about it for a year first.

All that being said, I do still like OrbStack a lot, and I hope to never see a repeat of this problem and how it was handled.

What would be the closest alternative on Linux? LXD? I've grown accustomed to the convenience of OrbStack.