To 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
Not quite, it’s still a VM. And while it supports virtio balloon for growing RAM, it doesn’t yet support releasing that RAM back to the host. And there isn’t a convenient way to shrink the sparse disk images as they grow yet, either.
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.
Cygwin was fun. I'd done zero development on Windows, but about 10 years ago I had to figure out how to deploy some nightly shell scripts across a bunch of local computers in a few dozen offices, where about 80% were MacOS and the rest were Windows. I don't remember exactly how I rigged it, but basically cygwin allowed me to keep the scripts as they were and trigger them in place, with a few small modifications.
I never want to deal with that again ;)
[edit] fwiw, Termux on Android is similarly a fun pseudo-environment. It's a nice and helpful toy.
The biggest issue I remember is directory seperators... windows of course using \ which bash would then interpret as an escape. Cygwin mostly papered over that from what I can recall, but it could lead to some weirdness, like sometimes you'd get C:\\path\\es\\like\\this
You could also use forward slashes, like C:/path/subpath, which has worked since Windows 1.0/DOS 2.0.
That's handy when you're entering paths in a Cygwin/MSYS Bash shell, but might not help much if you're trying to parse or otherwise work with existing patgh variables composed with backslashes.
Yes, you could if you were entering them manually, but some apps that generated file names would screw it up. I think they were using some sort of stdlib function to get the path seperator. Forward slash paths working in native windows apps also wasn't quite a given, either. Keep in mind this was a loooong time ago... like windows xp era maybe, even.
Yeah, I recall directory paths being the biggest PITA with running scripts in cygwin. But I mean, that was a very minor set of things to fix compared to what would've had to be written in anything else available at the time.
Doing retail office deployments of custom code on employee computers is a weird niche, and you find whatever works and hope you can maintain it somehow. Cygwin was awesome though, saved me a ton of time and the client a lot of money for the moment. (The client later stipulated to all future franchisees that they had to buy only Macs, lol)
Does any older folk here remembers when NT was the Cool New Thing (TM) and it had by design support to multiple subsystems plopped over the NT API, and Win32 was just one of them alongside POSIX (Interix) and OS/2? There was even a _very short_ time span when Interix was actually usable (it was extremely short though)
Yes, the only reason I cared for Linux in first place was that the POSIX support wasn't that good.
I am convinced that if POSIX subsystem was UNIX serious, GNU/Linux would never taken off on PC, and the whole would be divided between SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix and Windows NT.
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 server.
WSL1 was very conceptually appealing, and ended up working very poorly because of the poor matching between Linux syscalls and the Windows kernel. Git suffered terribly as a result. The inverse is also somewhat true - there have been cases where Wine is much slower than native Windows because Linux simply doesn't provide a simple way to achieve the same outcome, and interestingly the Wine developers have had reasonable (if tediously slow) success in making it possible to express the same semantics to Linux and have it handle things fast. It would be fascinating to know whether WSL1 developers didn't have enough traction to get Windows internals altered to match, or whether it's just way harder to do the same under Windows.
Wine achieves better performance these days due to things like... adding a module to the Linux kernel that implements NT-like synchronization primitives. So, Linux subsystem for NT synchronization basically. (a.k.a. NTSync)
Maybe this works out better because Linux is more flexible, while Windows/NT is more "set in its ways" and therefore more difficult to implement Linux on top of... Maybe?
Exactly what I thought. The Mac equivalent to WSL. Which is a great thing for Mac devs. Lots of stuff expects Linux these days, not POSIX. Mach isn’t Linux.
I don‘t understand why these tools always advertise about mounting the $HOME inside the container. Isn‘t it better to have a complete isolation? Isn‘t that the point of using such a thing?
No, the point of using such a thing is to be able to run Linux workloads. For example, I recently used Containerization to generate trace logs from the tup test suite so that I could bring it up to relative parity on macOS. If it had complete isolation, I would have difficulty getting the modified source code into the container and difficulty getting the trace logs back out of the container. Sure, you can paper over this with bind mounts or whatever the fuck but that's annoying
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 containers for anything but easier development, you need to be much more proficient than the average user already. In that case not exposing $HOME is just a small thing on your config to-do list.
This is all fine and dandy, but where are the native Darwin Jails Apple? Still scared that people will filling whole rooms of Mac Minis if you allow them to have multiple macOS containers and not only up to two fat VMs per machine?
macOS sandboxing is deliberately limited just enough to prevent anyone from truly implement Darwin-on-Darwin containers. People have been discussing about this for a while, see https://github.com/apple/container/discussions/611
In general I understand the rationale behind Apple's decision. They sell hardware, and there's real demand for macOS on servers to run build jobs and other Mac-only tools. Giving you the ability to run multiple containers on a single Mac would end up turning a 10 Mac Mini order into a 2 Mac Minis order for most people. Rest assured, even if it would be technically possible they'd find a way to cap it somehow via the EULA or whatever
This appears to be an LXC-style alternative for macOS; however, unlike native LXC on Linux, this tool relies on VMs. While Docker and Podman also utilize a VM on macOS, they offer the advantage of the Docker Compose format. In my view, the ability to use YAML for declarative configuration is the most critical feature for any container tool. I have nothing against CLI tools in general, but I prefer avoiding repetitive manual commands that could be easily automated via Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests.
I belong to a rare breed of very opportunistic hobby-developers that like to use MacOS but also like to use linux machines or BSDs (rpi etc) sometimes.
I can create docker-images with docker compose, or use something like colima, which this seems to be close to (that should have some advantages over docker, although my hope of circumventing W^X page protection did not pan out).
I was perplexed that the repository does not put these container machines in context. The seem to be close to colima? When should I use which option (docker, collima, container machines ?)
Maybe others wonder too but are ashamed to ask. I have no shame ;)
(OrbStack dev here.) Instead of Virtualization.framework, we have a custom Rust virtualization stack with custom devices and protocols for things like filesystem sharing. It's a highly optimized vertically integrated stack specifically for running our Linux machines and containers.
Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.
I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
Apple says that `systemctl` is supported... hmm am I missing something?
"Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed."
Just tested it on on an OCI image with systemd and it works well. I can see the appeal of OrbStack regarding memory reallocation and will stick with it in the time being :)
I’ve been using podman on Mac. It’s been a nice fit as the container build files are identical to what I use on my fedora server. I have noticed my 2 virtual core 4 gb Linode vps runs apps faster in the same container as when run on my MacBook Air M2 16 gb. I expected some performance overhead but didn’t think it would be noticeable as it is. Overall happy with podman. How might OrbStack differ?
I know this is off topic, but I do thank you for your Android work, the idea and elegance of fastboot.js and that SafetyNet workaround trick was truly really cool.
> Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.
Wow, missed this when reviewing OrbStack. I assumed that you just used Containerization and therefore would have the same limitation.
just dropping in to say orbstack super owns and i use it every day. huge respect to rethinking this experience, for a minute there i thought docker was just going to be the only path. i dont think ive looked back for docker since. orbstack just feels right, and damn its so fast and good with resources, and the UI is just insanely straight forward. props!
I wanted to make its VM/machine our default secure agent sandbox, but I couldn’t figure out how to isolate this VM from the host properly. This thread prompted me to find the issue though, and I saw this was recently implemented!
https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/169
Yep! Still refining it but isolated machines now have fine-grained settings for filesystem mounts, network isolation, SSH agent forwarding, and CPU/memory/disk limits
Super happy orbstack customer. Just curious on your statement:
> I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
The linked md document says:
> Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed.
Was that not the case when you used container machines?
That's my bad, I used the example alpine commands and the official alpine doesn't have init. It's supported if you build an image with systemd installed
just adding a 'hell yeah: orbstack is so good' to the thread. i mainly avoid containers where i can, but when containers need to happen, orbstack is 'just enough' for me. lovely and well considered ui, stable, performant. don't need much else. thank you for your work and care!
Not a full docker env, I aimed this as doing builds though you can run dockerd as an option, https://github.com/cpuguy83/crucible uses the containerization framework to run either build kitd or dockerd and wire it up to docker/buildx cli (or whatever client tooling you want to use).
The Containerization framework is a library that sits as a layer on top of the virtualization framework.
So each container is its own VM.
Machine is tooling above the containerization framework to run multiple things in a container in a vm.
I like orbstack in theory, but I find it hard to justify a $96/yr license fee for something that has so many open source, free alternatives. As it is, I’d rather use podman or colima
The alternatives are all broken in some ways is the answer, including the official paid docker enterprise.
Personally I’d rather the company provisioned me MacBook hardware with Linux. Unless Fable or some other ai ports asahi properly to modern hardware I expect to retire before this is possible, orbstack is the next best thing, available today.
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.
Just to clarify, this requires Mac OS 26 Tahoe for "container" doesn't it? So those of us holding out on Sequoia who can't stand the broken glass UI or what's called and the other undesired features need to stick to Docker desktop.
That's the most expensive part of the whole transaction, b/c AFAIK, RAM is then dedicated to the VM. It can be swapped out, I suppose, but that's not great.
My first thought as well, docker desktop overhead is pretty bad, would be awesome to see this land natively in DD. By my estimate this could happen, seeing as Docker has historically tried to improve performance but quickly had to accept platform limitations… would only be natural to settle DD over to containers
Well, you can avoid the Docker Desktop tax by not running Docker Desktop. colima is a perfectly usable implementation of Docker for macOS, without the bloat of Docker Desktop.
That said, colima still has the expensive VM that upthread is mentioning.
Python binary wheels now have to be built for aarch64 for them to work inside the container, unless they are built using the corresponding build system while installing. It is not common for python binary libs to publish arm64 binary wheels, as most often they target amd64.
They've now added a WSL-style virtual machine layer, but there's no x86 container story (Apple's killing Rosetta) so I imagine some qemu shimming will be required.
And, most obviously: NO SUPPORT FOR MACOS. This is the single feature that only Apple can do, and they're choosing not to implement it deliberately, and it's so stupid given the pains we all have to go through to implement CI for macOS. In the land of OCaml, we were forced to implement a custom ZFS snapshotter to get reasonably cost effective macOS CI for our package repository: https://tarides.com/blog/2023-08-02-obuilder-on-macos/. This was fun to build, but it sucks to have to maintain it.
Also, I'm really curious what the GPU passthrough story here is for LLMs, since the Apple Silicon -> Linux kernel support is gated on Asahi's support, but that's been lagging beyond M2 due to the efforts of reverse engineering.
Do better for your developers, Apple. This is a half-baked sweep across third-party software without addressing the core needs around your own operating system.
Anyone know why you would use this instead of QEMU+Lima+Colima+Docker/containerd? The latter works on multiple OSes, has a very large ecosystem of tools, images, documentation, and lets you replace pieces as needed
It's funny that the system config page (https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...) lists pebibytes for RAM configurations... in this day and age where buying a 16GB stick for workstation would cause me to eat instant ramen for a couple of months because my dentist needs an LLM chatbot on their page to stay competitive!
The costs are startup time and image compatibility: dockerhub images don't work as machine images because container machine expects systemd
I am trying it on but its brekaing on homebrew 1.0.0. The formula puts plugins at opt/container/libexec/container-plugins/ and the apiserver looks in libexec/container/plugins/
> dockerhub images don't work as machine images because container machine expects systemd
Are you sure about that? A few comments above a commenter states that they don’t run inits at all (because they ran alpine), multiple people replied that it works fine if you give it an image with an init, and they acknowledged their error.
How is this different from Virtualbox or similar products with a shared folder with the host machine? I expected that existing virtualization tech for Macs already did that. Maybe the improvement is having nothing to configure.
By the way, is it headless or can it run a full Linux desktop? Use case: buy a Mac, uninistall whatever can be uninstalled, run the Linux VM as primary desktop forgetting MacOS and without going through Asahi and the incomplete hardware support.
Curious if you've tried OrbStack? There's always more work to do (test workloads appreciated!) but we've put a lot of effort into optimizing for small files and other common developer workloads in OrbStack's customized filesystem sharing protocol (not standard virtiofs).
Did you use their volumes for node_modules or a shared dir? I mounted the whole project directory (with node_modules) inside the container and it seems to work fine (MBA M1 8 GB RAM).
Is there any reason why macOS doesn't try a WSL1 style approach? I get why that didn't fully work out for windows, but it seems like macOS being another *nix would make a lot of what was hard for windows, easy for mac. It seems like it should be possible to run most linux applications natively on macOS with few additional new APIs.
Potentially faster application execution along much lower memory requirements. In the case of docker, even a possibility of shared library loading further reducing runtime costs (For example, containers based on the same base image could load glibc into memory only once).
There's also simply the possibility of using linux software directly in macos without doing OS dependent changes to the software.
Yes, but a big part of the problem with WSL1 was the size of the conceptual gap between POSIX and Windows NT that WSL1 had to bridge. An “MSL1” would likely have fewer problems because the gap between macOS and Linux is smaller, given they are both POSIX
The other thing Apple could potentially do, is add Linux-compatible APIs to macOS. IBM wanted to support Kubernetes on their z/OS mainframe operating system, so they implemented on it a clone of Linux namespace APIs, e.g. unshare. Then we could have macOS nodes in a K8S cluster-which might actually be useful for some people, e.g. if you have a Jenkins CI farm, the Linux nodes can run on K8S, but currently macOS nodes (which you need if you are targeting iOS or macOS) can’t, they have to be bare metal or VMs.
More Linux-macOS source compatibility would also benefit macOS by making it less work to port software to it from Linux
Linux and the BSDs take APIs one from the other all of the time. The issue with having a Linux ABI is that you don't need just the few APIs you're missing, you need to implement the WHOLE Linux API and it has to be _perfect_, otherwise stuff will randomly break. I loved the original WSL, I had to use it for a time period back in the day when I was stuck on a Windows PC, but it can't be denied it was full of random bugs
FreeBSD has Linuxlator because there is a lot of binary only software that was never and never will be ported to BSD, so it's necessary for them in order to avoid bleeding users away. Conversely, macOS has basically all software ported natively to it, so when you _need_ a Linux environment 95% of the time it isn't because you need $XYZ that only run Linux, but because you need a proper Linux environment with systemd, cgroups etc. Implementing that stuff on top of XNU would probably be extremely expensive and it would arguably defeat the point of having their own kernel in the first place.
Most of my team's development happens on beefy desktop machine in incus containers per dev+project (so you run yourname-projname-dev). It has its own tailscale inside so you can open it like regular https website or give to another dev to check out – no need to deploy your branch somewhere, just run it. New dev onboard takes 10 minutes from zero to dev env with VSCode remote development.
I would really love if apple could give inexpensive way to run amd64 containers for situations when dev wants to use their own hardware. We've used LIMA for now, was too much of a hussle. But if there's a more native experience – would give it another try.
This is pretty cool - being able to bring your own container machine image goes a long way to helping it's adoption.
I started using Colima a couple of years ago because I got bored of how bad Docker Desktop was and just started using the CLI / the "Services" tool window in whatever Jetbrains IDE I was using at the time anyway. I can't see myself moving away from it any time - having multiple profiles is an absolute winner of a feature for me there, but maybe the next time I set up a Mac from scratch I'll have a play with this.
So 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.
it always gets a sad chuckle out of me to hear that some native linux ports run worse than the windows version under proton. i think valve games are like that (l4d2 for example) and recently I think Hollow Knight: Silksong was like that
I think at this point native linux ports are somewhat a thing of the past. The problem was that the ports were usually contracted out to a 3rd party and rarely updated or cared for that much. There was also the issue that they often relied on dynamically linked libraries provided by the distro rather than static linked libraries bundled with the game. So stuff that did work would break on distro updates.
The proton model has the benefit that bugs on linux can be fixed by Valve and the Wine community. While bugs in an official linux port can only be fixed by the game publisher which rarely happened. There also seems to be virtually no downsides to running a Windows game in Proton. These days I don't even bother checking the Wine DB or proton rating because unless the game is deliberately blocking linux via anti cheat, it will just work.
The irony that without Windows there are no Linux games, eventually Linux folks will learn about OS/2 history in regards to Windows compatibility features.
Linux will stay forever a headless operating system great for embedded, server rooms and containers.
We have all limited time on Earth, and eventually Valve won't be around as it used to be, might even be acquired, sold, whatever, then what in regards to Linux gaming?
Wine existed before Proton, Valve made it better but the project doesn't rely on Valve. Currently Linux is the best gaming experience. Zero bloat or nagware, everything just works. It's just ironic Wine/Proton ended up being the best platform for gaming on Linux. I don't think anyone expected it to run so well with virtually no performance impact.
Now with the Fex project, it might end up that running Windows games on linux on a modern ARM processor could be the best way to game going forward, especially for mobile platforms like the SteamDeck.
The best gaming experience are Switch, PlayStation, XBox, iOS, Android, the very definition of everything just works, and no kernel drivers to worry about.
You just listed concrete hardware (with the exception of Android). That's a category error, of course a fixed hardware with specialized software will have less inconsistencies.
Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.
If you can express that operation in Terraform, then Coder would let you do that. First problems I can think of are connectivity from the Coder provisioner to your local machine (Tailscale? Local?), and migrating disk images if you want to actually switch a workspace between environments (local provisioner could do this, but no matter what it’ll be slow and janky).
I was wondering if it's possible to have the container volume change to, say, an external drive. I currently use QMEU with qcow2 images to achieve this, works well enough.
Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.
And what is the revenue stream tied to that ci/cd pipeline they aren’t capturing today? Apple would sell less hardware in order to…?
There aren’t any app developers avoiding the Apple ecosystem because there aren’t Darwin containers. They don’t sell server hardware and by all accounts have no intention of ever reentering that space. So they’d spend a bunch of developer cycles to reduce their own revenue stream with no apparent upside beyond “goodwill” which they’ve never been overly concerned about.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by the same logic, you could also say this whole containerization framework is of no use either.
If they're investing resources into it regardless, they might at least try making something that Docker for macOS and co. haven't solved the same exact way already. Something that, due to their almost unhealthy obsession with "system integrity", only they can realistically make. Like native containers.
Supporting the containerization framework lets them sell more laptops to Linux devs that may have otherwise bought a Dell or hp or insert brand to run Linux natively on or windows with WSL.
Apple set itself up for defeat in the server and developer marketplace as soon as they decided macOS was proprietary code.
Why would any serious developer use closed-source code they can't debug and modify? Especially for a production server?
It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS, like part of the point of being a developer is being able to dig into the code at any layer and debug and fix things.
For server side, which I believe is the context here, Linux and open source are king.
Even Microsoft gave up on Windows and just runs Linux most things except niche cases. Heck, even SQL Server which is expensive piece of machinery got ported to Linux and that's the default target now in their docs.
With that said, one can't deny Apple's success on the b2c side of things so it feels wrong to call their strategy a failure.
Which is an Pyrrhic victory, when Linus and other founders are long gone, most of this generation actually, what will subsist are proprietary forks, just like what happened with UNIX System V.
OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.
That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.
I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.
> Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard
Apple uses OpenBSD's Packet Filter [1]; I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem. Back in the Snow Leopard days, it was FreeBSD's IPFW, which is also no slouch.
With colima I can run AMD64 (x86) Linux containers in my Arm64 too. I think this is strictly for Arm64 Linux VMs, or is there some way to run x86 with this too?
You can run amd64 binaries inside an aarch64 Linux virtual machine. Although they're not supporting Rosetta for macOS apps from macOS 27, the Rosetta support in Virtualization Framework will remain.
Thank you for sharing this - I looked into OrbStack a few months ago, and this was the reason I didn't use it (as my primary purpose was to have an external wifi adapter for wifi pwnage).
What happened to Orbstack for like 9 months until earlier this year? Suddenly everything went silent for a bit and I was pretty concerned. Glad y’all are back!!!!
I've successfully tinkered with USB/IP with Apple containers, but it does require loading a custom kernel (which they make pretty easy, thankfully). On the host side, macOS also doesn't make it easy to unload a driver that attaches automatically.
> a legitimate business interest to further incentivize the adoption of Apple Silicon devices
Apple has never been about supporting legacy platforms with new features. And with over a quarter of revenue and two fifths of Apple's gross profits coming from services, one could argue the incentives run either way.
Rosetta 2. Rosetta was for Intel to emulate 68k, now if you could get Rosetta 2 to run under Rosetta, then you could run 68k, on an ARM, and if you could get the apple ][ emulator...
Enterprise ARM servers are still a niche product, and so are the ARM developer machines running Linux or Windows. Until this significantly changes, Apple will have to provide good x86 interop - or lose the developer market entirely.
Forcing people towards Apple silicon is of course an attractive approach when targeting the large portion of the market using their MacBooks as Facebook browsing machines, but (especially with the new MacBook Neo) what's going to happen when a large portion of the market for high-end MBPs disappears because it turned from the default no-brainer into a liability?
I saw the video on this this is distrobox basically for Mac. It’s very cool. Seamless with your local files and the container. I’m very keen to try it.
that thepolfus and the Otis and the bors and the alschweid and pretty much anyone in old the the gs gangstalk or just getting people info to sit in the same room as them to try and makr them go crazy deserve to brave hart quartered
I found it hard to believe I didn’t have a simple way of staying safe by installing an arbitrary application in a sandbox on macOS. (Restoring using Time Machine doesn’t count! :) )
This is a step in the right direction but requires any given developer’s buy-in first, right?
To 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
Ah, the Darwin/BSD Subsystem for Linux.
Not quite, it’s still a VM. And while it supports virtio balloon for growing RAM, it doesn’t yet support releasing that RAM back to the host. And there isn’t a convenient way to shrink the sparse disk images as they grow yet, either.
Isn't the Windows subsystem for Linux (the reference there) also a VM?
Only WSL2; WSL1 was an actual subsystem.
So this is Darwin/BSD Subsystem for Linux 2.
Yes.
WSL1 was so cool, WSL2 made it boring and isolated.
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.
... Now it's just called git bash
Just install and use MSYS2, git bash is derived from it anyway, and a regular MSYS2 installation offers a lot more.
Cygwin was fun. I'd done zero development on Windows, but about 10 years ago I had to figure out how to deploy some nightly shell scripts across a bunch of local computers in a few dozen offices, where about 80% were MacOS and the rest were Windows. I don't remember exactly how I rigged it, but basically cygwin allowed me to keep the scripts as they were and trigger them in place, with a few small modifications.
I never want to deal with that again ;)
[edit] fwiw, Termux on Android is similarly a fun pseudo-environment. It's a nice and helpful toy.
The biggest issue I remember is directory seperators... windows of course using \ which bash would then interpret as an escape. Cygwin mostly papered over that from what I can recall, but it could lead to some weirdness, like sometimes you'd get C:\\path\\es\\like\\this
You could also use forward slashes, like C:/path/subpath, which has worked since Windows 1.0/DOS 2.0.
That's handy when you're entering paths in a Cygwin/MSYS Bash shell, but might not help much if you're trying to parse or otherwise work with existing patgh variables composed with backslashes.
Yes, you could if you were entering them manually, but some apps that generated file names would screw it up. I think they were using some sort of stdlib function to get the path seperator. Forward slash paths working in native windows apps also wasn't quite a given, either. Keep in mind this was a loooong time ago... like windows xp era maybe, even.
Yeah, I recall directory paths being the biggest PITA with running scripts in cygwin. But I mean, that was a very minor set of things to fix compared to what would've had to be written in anything else available at the time.
Doing retail office deployments of custom code on employee computers is a weird niche, and you find whatever works and hope you can maintain it somehow. Cygwin was awesome though, saved me a ton of time and the client a lot of money for the moment. (The client later stipulated to all future franchisees that they had to buy only Macs, lol)
We should be using the baguette emoji for path separators for cross-platform compatibility.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/96ufiz/pro...
Does any older folk here remembers when NT was the Cool New Thing (TM) and it had by design support to multiple subsystems plopped over the NT API, and Win32 was just one of them alongside POSIX (Interix) and OS/2? There was even a _very short_ time span when Interix was actually usable (it was extremely short though)
Yes, the only reason I cared for Linux in first place was that the POSIX support wasn't that good.
I am convinced that if POSIX subsystem was UNIX serious, GNU/Linux would never taken off on PC, and the whole would be divided between SGI, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix and Windows NT.
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. And we started to see Linux replace FreeBSD and commercial Unixes.
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.
> Back in my day you to to download a couple GB worth of cygwin
You still can, and it still works exactly the same way.
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 server.
shrug. I haven't owned a Windows machine in years at this point. It's one of those things like PHP that I just decided my life was better off without.
It was soooo slow though. Practically unusable for anything i/o heavy.
Those issues could have been fixed…
WSL1 was very conceptually appealing, and ended up working very poorly because of the poor matching between Linux syscalls and the Windows kernel. Git suffered terribly as a result. The inverse is also somewhat true - there have been cases where Wine is much slower than native Windows because Linux simply doesn't provide a simple way to achieve the same outcome, and interestingly the Wine developers have had reasonable (if tediously slow) success in making it possible to express the same semantics to Linux and have it handle things fast. It would be fascinating to know whether WSL1 developers didn't have enough traction to get Windows internals altered to match, or whether it's just way harder to do the same under Windows.
Wine achieves better performance these days due to things like... adding a module to the Linux kernel that implements NT-like synchronization primitives. So, Linux subsystem for NT synchronization basically. (a.k.a. NTSync)
Maybe this works out better because Linux is more flexible, while Windows/NT is more "set in its ways" and therefore more difficult to implement Linux on top of... Maybe?
Mac Subsystem for Linux 2
Exactly what I thought. The Mac equivalent to WSL. Which is a great thing for Mac devs. Lots of stuff expects Linux these days, not POSIX. Mach isn’t Linux.
> ... highly integrated Linux environment that works seamlessly on your Mac. ...
Which kernel is running, and is it hosted in hypervisor.framework, as is done with UTM (when not using the qemu mode)?
The katas container kernel by default.
> filesystem mounting
How is this different to bind mounts
Very different: Linux running in a virtual machine can't bind mount into a macOS host's filesystem. So they use virtiofs.
how does that compare to something like, eg, Orbstack?
I don‘t understand why these tools always advertise about mounting the $HOME inside the container. Isn‘t it better to have a complete isolation? Isn‘t that the point of using such a thing?
No, the point of using such a thing is to be able to run Linux workloads. For example, I recently used Containerization to generate trace logs from the tup test suite so that I could bring it up to relative parity on macOS. If it had complete isolation, I would have difficulty getting the modified source code into the container and difficulty getting the trace logs back out of the container. Sure, you can paper over this with bind mounts or whatever the fuck but that's annoying
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 containers for anything but easier development, you need to be much more proficient than the average user already. In that case not exposing $HOME is just a small thing on your config to-do list.
[1] https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Docker_Securi...
This is all fine and dandy, but where are the native Darwin Jails Apple? Still scared that people will filling whole rooms of Mac Minis if you allow them to have multiple macOS containers and not only up to two fat VMs per machine?
[Replied to wrong comment]
That's totally unrelated to what I wrote
sandbox profiles?
macOS sandboxing is deliberately limited just enough to prevent anyone from truly implement Darwin-on-Darwin containers. People have been discussing about this for a while, see https://github.com/apple/container/discussions/611
In general I understand the rationale behind Apple's decision. They sell hardware, and there's real demand for macOS on servers to run build jobs and other Mac-only tools. Giving you the ability to run multiple containers on a single Mac would end up turning a 10 Mac Mini order into a 2 Mac Minis order for most people. Rest assured, even if it would be technically possible they'd find a way to cap it somehow via the EULA or whatever
This appears to be an LXC-style alternative for macOS; however, unlike native LXC on Linux, this tool relies on VMs. While Docker and Podman also utilize a VM on macOS, they offer the advantage of the Docker Compose format. In my view, the ability to use YAML for declarative configuration is the most critical feature for any container tool. I have nothing against CLI tools in general, but I prefer avoiding repetitive manual commands that could be easily automated via Docker Compose or Kubernetes manifests.
Apple does have an OCI variant of this: https://github.com/apple/container
Doesn’t seem to have Compose support though, but it’s probably not impossible to build upon.
And of course, it also uses VMs, though unlike Docker, it’s one (micro-?) VM per container: https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
I belong to a rare breed of very opportunistic hobby-developers that like to use MacOS but also like to use linux machines or BSDs (rpi etc) sometimes.
I can create docker-images with docker compose, or use something like colima, which this seems to be close to (that should have some advantages over docker, although my hope of circumventing W^X page protection did not pan out).
I was perplexed that the repository does not put these container machines in context. The seem to be close to colima? When should I use which option (docker, collima, container machines ?)
Maybe others wonder too but are ashamed to ask. I have no shame ;)
Thanks for any pointers
https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-... read documentation mr. rare breed
Like, this doesn’t answer when to use this vs Docker. Any reference there?
Why try to circumvent W^X page protection? Some sort of self-modifying program without extra pointer indirections?
Bad legacy apps like Xilinx ISE
OrbStack works really well for me. I wonder how it’s compared to this performance wise
(OrbStack dev here.) Instead of Virtualization.framework, we have a custom Rust virtualization stack with custom devices and protocols for things like filesystem sharing. It's a highly optimized vertically integrated stack specifically for running our Linux machines and containers.
Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.
I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
Thanks for the info kdrag0n! Big fan of OrbStack; good call out on dynamic memory.
If the guest image has /sbin/init, we use that.
We'd recommend using a base image for the guest that includes systemd. ie: https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...
Apple says that `systemctl` is supported... hmm am I missing something?
"Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed."
Good catch, I tried the example alpine commands and there was no init system. Makes sense if it's based on OCI images
Just tested it on on an OCI image with systemd and it works well. I can see the appeal of OrbStack regarding memory reallocation and will stick with it in the time being :)
I’ve been using podman on Mac. It’s been a nice fit as the container build files are identical to what I use on my fedora server. I have noticed my 2 virtual core 4 gb Linode vps runs apps faster in the same container as when run on my MacBook Air M2 16 gb. I expected some performance overhead but didn’t think it would be noticeable as it is. Overall happy with podman. How might OrbStack differ?
Having used both, it feels like OrbStack "just works" more than Podman. The main example of this is Supabase.
I know this is off topic, but I do thank you for your Android work, the idea and elegance of fastboot.js and that SafetyNet workaround trick was truly really cool.
Ahh those were good times, glad you came across it :)
I love orbstack, is there any code I could read on the rust side? Seems very interesting
> Our biggest perf/resource gain is dynamic memory, which reduces memory usage a lot by releasing unused memory back to macOS. Nothing else supports this, including Containerization.
Wow, missed this when reviewing OrbStack. I assumed that you just used Containerization and therefore would have the same limitation.
just dropping in to say orbstack super owns and i use it every day. huge respect to rethinking this experience, for a minute there i thought docker was just going to be the only path. i dont think ive looked back for docker since. orbstack just feels right, and damn its so fast and good with resources, and the UI is just insanely straight forward. props!
We love OrbStack too! Thank you for it,
I wanted to make its VM/machine our default secure agent sandbox, but I couldn’t figure out how to isolate this VM from the host properly. This thread prompted me to find the issue though, and I saw this was recently implemented! https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/169
Yep! Still refining it but isolated machines now have fine-grained settings for filesystem mounts, network isolation, SSH agent forwarding, and CPU/memory/disk limits
Super happy orbstack customer. Just curious on your statement:
> I gave Container Machines a try and it seems to be much closer to OCI containers with a default bind mount than OrbStack machines. It has fewer integrations and doesn't run systemd or any other normal init system, so it's hard to run services.
The linked md document says:
> Real Linux services for testing. Run a database or whatever your stack needs as a system service — systemctl start postgresql works on images with systemd installed.
Was that not the case when you used container machines?
That's my bad, I used the example alpine commands and the official alpine doesn't have init. It's supported if you build an image with systemd installed
When are y’all gonna support sandboxing? Preferably Docker Sandboxes?
just adding a 'hell yeah: orbstack is so good' to the thread. i mainly avoid containers where i can, but when containers need to happen, orbstack is 'just enough' for me. lovely and well considered ui, stable, performant. don't need much else. thank you for your work and care!
Orbstack plays well with Pycharms BTW.
I changed over to Orbstack just for local builds and it is one of those apps that makes owning a Mac that much better.
This post reminded me to buy a license, just done it, worth it for the time saved.
Those are awesome features! The one missing for me is bridge networking. Any idea why orbstack doesn’t have that?
https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/342
I really like OrbStack and am also not sure why I'd use Container Machines over it, at the moment...
I'd like to see a comparison to https://tart.run/ as well.
AFAICT it's pretty similar.
Not a full docker env, I aimed this as doing builds though you can run dockerd as an option, https://github.com/cpuguy83/crucible uses the containerization framework to run either build kitd or dockerd and wire it up to docker/buildx cli (or whatever client tooling you want to use).
The Containerization framework is a library that sits as a layer on top of the virtualization framework. So each container is its own VM.
Machine is tooling above the containerization framework to run multiple things in a container in a vm.
I like orbstack in theory, but I find it hard to justify a $96/yr license fee for something that has so many open source, free alternatives. As it is, I’d rather use podman or colima
It's free for personal use, and for a company 96/year is absolutely nothing, I'd hope.
The alternatives are all broken in some ways is the answer, including the official paid docker enterprise.
Personally I’d rather the company provisioned me MacBook hardware with Linux. Unless Fable or some other ai ports asahi properly to modern hardware I expect to retire before this is possible, orbstack is the next best thing, available today.
Note that orbstack supports audio and usb pass through, which is super nice
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.
Thank you for mentioning this, I have been suffering under the yoke of docker.
Do these containers share a common kernel? Or are they each ran in a separate VM?
Edit: It's a VM per container. https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/technical-...
Just to clarify, this requires Mac OS 26 Tahoe for "container" doesn't it? So those of us holding out on Sequoia who can't stand the broken glass UI or what's called and the other undesired features need to stick to Docker desktop.
Will this be able to replace docker desktop an equivalents, removing the expensive Linux VM that runs alongside them?
That sure would be nice. I seem to rm -rf ~/.colima every few days.
It mostly removes the big shared background VM and replaces it with smaller, more isolated Apple-native VMs.
I did an experiment migrating my Podman workload to Apple's container @ https://gist.github.com/jmonster/39e14585e107dbf990a90966c0f...
TL;DR reduces ram/storage usage; minimizes it's existence
How does that work, realistically?
> Memory defaults to half of host memory
That's the most expensive part of the whole transaction, b/c AFAIK, RAM is then dedicated to the VM. It can be swapped out, I suppose, but that's not great.
CGamesPlay said above its balloon memory so it won’t use all that memory by default, but it can’t release balloon memory yet.
Nice, thanks for this. My plan is to swap over to Apple's containers for local dev, and keep using podman quadlets in production.
My first thought as well, docker desktop overhead is pretty bad, would be awesome to see this land natively in DD. By my estimate this could happen, seeing as Docker has historically tried to improve performance but quickly had to accept platform limitations… would only be natural to settle DD over to containers
Well, you can avoid the Docker Desktop tax by not running Docker Desktop. colima is a perfectly usable implementation of Docker for macOS, without the bloat of Docker Desktop.
That said, colima still has the expensive VM that upthread is mentioning.
OrbStack is great also
Postman Desktop too
You mean Podman Desktop?
Yes, thank you iOS autocorrect.
Others here mention it and I’m a new convert to Colima.
The pain of working around Docker Desktop is bad.
Linux VMs on doesn't have to be expensive!
Python binary wheels now have to be built for aarch64 for them to work inside the container, unless they are built using the corresponding build system while installing. It is not common for python binary libs to publish arm64 binary wheels, as most often they target amd64.
Isn't that just expected for modern macOS devices? They have been on arm64 for 6 years now.
I looked at this last year when it came out in Tahoe: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/apple-containerisation and this looks like more of the same.
They've now added a WSL-style virtual machine layer, but there's no x86 container story (Apple's killing Rosetta) so I imagine some qemu shimming will be required.
There's still no equivalent to VPNKit or GVisor for networking so you'll be bridging I think. See: https://cacm.acm.org/research/a-decade-of-docker-containers/ for how Docker for Mac does this
I can't spot any support for dynamic memory ballooning to prevent the hypervisor from gobbling up too much memory. We've had this in Xen since forever! https://xenproject.org/blog/ballooning-rebooting-and-the-fea...
And, most obviously: NO SUPPORT FOR MACOS. This is the single feature that only Apple can do, and they're choosing not to implement it deliberately, and it's so stupid given the pains we all have to go through to implement CI for macOS. In the land of OCaml, we were forced to implement a custom ZFS snapshotter to get reasonably cost effective macOS CI for our package repository: https://tarides.com/blog/2023-08-02-obuilder-on-macos/. This was fun to build, but it sucks to have to maintain it.
Also, I'm really curious what the GPU passthrough story here is for LLMs, since the Apple Silicon -> Linux kernel support is gated on Asahi's support, but that's been lagging beyond M2 due to the efforts of reverse engineering.
Do better for your developers, Apple. This is a half-baked sweep across third-party software without addressing the core needs around your own operating system.
Anyone know why you would use this instead of QEMU+Lima+Colima+Docker/containerd? The latter works on multiple OSes, has a very large ecosystem of tools, images, documentation, and lets you replace pieces as needed
And no GPU passthrough? So colima with libkit remains the only method on Apple Silicon?
It's funny that the system config page (https://github.com/apple/container/blob/main/docs/container-...) lists pebibytes for RAM configurations... in this day and age where buying a 16GB stick for workstation would cause me to eat instant ramen for a couple of months because my dentist needs an LLM chatbot on their page to stay competitive!
UX wise it looks kinda neat though!
The costs are startup time and image compatibility: dockerhub images don't work as machine images because container machine expects systemd
I am trying it on but its brekaing on homebrew 1.0.0. The formula puts plugins at opt/container/libexec/container-plugins/ and the apiserver looks in libexec/container/plugins/
This can be solved through a symlink or smth
> dockerhub images don't work as machine images because container machine expects systemd
Are you sure about that? A few comments above a commenter states that they don’t run inits at all (because they ran alpine), multiple people replied that it works fine if you give it an image with an init, and they acknowledged their error.
How is this different from Virtualbox or similar products with a shared folder with the host machine? I expected that existing virtualization tech for Macs already did that. Maybe the improvement is having nothing to configure.
By the way, is it headless or can it run a full Linux desktop? Use case: buy a Mac, uninistall whatever can be uninstalled, run the Linux VM as primary desktop forgetting MacOS and without going through Asahi and the incomplete hardware support.
it differs by lacking all the cool options that makes vmware and virtualbox good products, but apple users will praise it as a benefit
"bind mounts? I'm better without it"
Is this new? I thought we had this already
In my testing (iirc) filesystem performance was not good enough to be usable with node/rust dev where lots of small files get stat-ed
update: what's new is the `container machine` subcommand. I went to test it out, but container failed to run at all for me: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/1681
Curious if you've tried OrbStack? There's always more work to do (test workloads appreciated!) but we've put a lot of effort into optimizing for small files and other common developer workloads in OrbStack's customized filesystem sharing protocol (not standard virtiofs).
Podman is on macOS, FWIW. Uses the existing container framework to run the machine already. Root-full or not.
Did you use their volumes for node_modules or a shared dir? I mounted the whole project directory (with node_modules) inside the container and it seems to work fine (MBA M1 8 GB RAM).
Is there any reason why macOS doesn't try a WSL1 style approach? I get why that didn't fully work out for windows, but it seems like macOS being another *nix would make a lot of what was hard for windows, easy for mac. It seems like it should be possible to run most linux applications natively on macOS with few additional new APIs.
BSD actually has this already.
What would be the advantages over a VM infrastructure Apple needs anyway and that has a much simpler, more stable “ABI” compared to the Linux kernel?
Potentially faster application execution along much lower memory requirements. In the case of docker, even a possibility of shared library loading further reducing runtime costs (For example, containers based on the same base image could load glibc into memory only once).
There's also simply the possibility of using linux software directly in macos without doing OS dependent changes to the software.
Yeah. But in exchange it’s a lot of work to keep up with. For GUI stuff you’re now having to have some sort of Wayland layer/driver.
Running VMs is really really easy and low maintenance demand on Apple. And it’s guaranteed compatibility.
Wasn’t compatibility what really sunk WSL1?
> Wasn’t compatibility what really sunk WSL1?
Yes, but a big part of the problem with WSL1 was the size of the conceptual gap between POSIX and Windows NT that WSL1 had to bridge. An “MSL1” would likely have fewer problems because the gap between macOS and Linux is smaller, given they are both POSIX
The other thing Apple could potentially do, is add Linux-compatible APIs to macOS. IBM wanted to support Kubernetes on their z/OS mainframe operating system, so they implemented on it a clone of Linux namespace APIs, e.g. unshare. Then we could have macOS nodes in a K8S cluster-which might actually be useful for some people, e.g. if you have a Jenkins CI farm, the Linux nodes can run on K8S, but currently macOS nodes (which you need if you are targeting iOS or macOS) can’t, they have to be bare metal or VMs.
More Linux-macOS source compatibility would also benefit macOS by making it less work to port software to it from Linux
Linux and the BSDs take APIs one from the other all of the time. The issue with having a Linux ABI is that you don't need just the few APIs you're missing, you need to implement the WHOLE Linux API and it has to be _perfect_, otherwise stuff will randomly break. I loved the original WSL, I had to use it for a time period back in the day when I was stuck on a Windows PC, but it can't be denied it was full of random bugs
FreeBSD has Linuxlator because there is a lot of binary only software that was never and never will be ported to BSD, so it's necessary for them in order to avoid bleeding users away. Conversely, macOS has basically all software ported natively to it, so when you _need_ a Linux environment 95% of the time it isn't because you need $XYZ that only run Linux, but because you need a proper Linux environment with systemd, cgroups etc. Implementing that stuff on top of XNU would probably be extremely expensive and it would arguably defeat the point of having their own kernel in the first place.
I've looked into replacing Lima with Apple Containers for https://runmachine.dev.
However, unlike Lima, an Apple Container is not a full VM, so you cannot SSH to it, or forward SSH-agent signatures into a machine.
So it's more of a devcontainer story, which is also a great use case. Nice to see Apple creating tooling around their VZ framework.
Edit: referential clarity.
Might consider https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
It's a full vm
Most of my team's development happens on beefy desktop machine in incus containers per dev+project (so you run yourname-projname-dev). It has its own tailscale inside so you can open it like regular https website or give to another dev to check out – no need to deploy your branch somewhere, just run it. New dev onboard takes 10 minutes from zero to dev env with VSCode remote development.
I would really love if apple could give inexpensive way to run amd64 containers for situations when dev wants to use their own hardware. We've used LIMA for now, was too much of a hussle. But if there's a more native experience – would give it another try.
Apple containers are great for providing a sandbox to your AI coding agents
I have made it a MCP so that it's easily discoverable by all the coding agents
https://github.com/instavm/coderunner
Always nice to have more options especially without third party tools
This is pretty cool - being able to bring your own container machine image goes a long way to helping it's adoption.
I started using Colima a couple of years ago because I got bored of how bad Docker Desktop was and just started using the CLI / the "Services" tool window in whatever Jetbrains IDE I was using at the time anyway. I can't see myself moving away from it any time - having multiple profiles is an absolute winner of a feature for me there, but maybe the next time I set up a Mac from scratch I'll have a play with this.
So 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.
I’d argue they both admin that Linux servers are the target for a lot of applications to run on. Not to develop on.
Enterprises would do anything to develop on Linux except using an actual Linux distro.
I'm surprised they cared enough to do this. I'd still rather use Linux but MacBook value is incredible.
I'd always rather use Linux, but sometimes your employer gives you a MacBook. I might use this tool.
This blew up spectacularly when combined with Time Machine, I wonder if that’s fixed.
With the BUILD and WWDC 2026 announcements, it is the Year of Linux Containers Desktop.
Which for many folks is good enough for what they are doing, thus the status quo of desktop platforms will hardly change for current form factors.
Could this allow us to use proton on mac maybe?
This is hilarious. Next year, the PC gamers will be saying "The best Windows gaming experience is win32 on Linux on macOS Containers".
I mean at this point literally anything works better than Windows.
Except game development, hence Proton.
it always gets a sad chuckle out of me to hear that some native linux ports run worse than the windows version under proton. i think valve games are like that (l4d2 for example) and recently I think Hollow Knight: Silksong was like that
I think at this point native linux ports are somewhat a thing of the past. The problem was that the ports were usually contracted out to a 3rd party and rarely updated or cared for that much. There was also the issue that they often relied on dynamically linked libraries provided by the distro rather than static linked libraries bundled with the game. So stuff that did work would break on distro updates.
The proton model has the benefit that bugs on linux can be fixed by Valve and the Wine community. While bugs in an official linux port can only be fixed by the game publisher which rarely happened. There also seems to be virtually no downsides to running a Windows game in Proton. These days I don't even bother checking the Wine DB or proton rating because unless the game is deliberately blocking linux via anti cheat, it will just work.
The irony that without Windows there are no Linux games, eventually Linux folks will learn about OS/2 history in regards to Windows compatibility features.
Linux will stay forever a headless operating system great for embedded, server rooms and containers.
We have all limited time on Earth, and eventually Valve won't be around as it used to be, might even be acquired, sold, whatever, then what in regards to Linux gaming?
Wine existed before Proton, Valve made it better but the project doesn't rely on Valve. Currently Linux is the best gaming experience. Zero bloat or nagware, everything just works. It's just ironic Wine/Proton ended up being the best platform for gaming on Linux. I don't think anyone expected it to run so well with virtually no performance impact.
Now with the Fex project, it might end up that running Windows games on linux on a modern ARM processor could be the best way to game going forward, especially for mobile platforms like the SteamDeck.
The best gaming experience are Switch, PlayStation, XBox, iOS, Android, the very definition of everything just works, and no kernel drivers to worry about.
You just listed concrete hardware (with the exception of Android). That's a category error, of course a fixed hardware with specialized software will have less inconsistencies.
You would be happier if I listed the respective OSes instead?
The fastest (Geekbench 6) Windows laptop in the world is actually an M5 Max Macbook running Parallels running Windows.
Wine works fine on macOS, there is no need for a Linux layer.
I don't think so. This is a VM, closer to WSL2.
Proton is based on Wine which translates Windows instructions to Linux.
Besides there's already Wine for mac.
But I would love to be wrong here.
I hope this brought us one step closer to being able to run our distros of choice very freely and easily on a Mac.
Why did they have to invent their own solution instead of just shipping docker or an equivalent clone ?
Isn't docker on mac os still a large preallocated linux VM that runs the containers inside itself? With this maybe you can separate them.
In the intro it mentions automatically mapping user and home dir. So host files accessible the container. Any settings to control this?
Wouldn’t it be nice if services like Codespaces or Coder or Gitlab would allow you to target running on their hosted/integrated platform, or let you launch that same container completely locally? Sometimes I wanna take my “remote” dev environment off-line but still benefit from the integrated UX.
If you can express that operation in Terraform, then Coder would let you do that. First problems I can think of are connectivity from the Coder provisioner to your local machine (Tailscale? Local?), and migrating disk images if you want to actually switch a workspace between environments (local provisioner could do this, but no matter what it’ll be slow and janky).
This exists. It's called devcontainers and there is a cli for managing it locally.
https://github.com/devcontainers/ https://containers.dev/
Maybe I don't understand but why doesn't Gitlabs self hosted setup work?
We have WSL at home.
I was wondering if it's possible to have the container volume change to, say, an external drive. I currently use QMEU with qcow2 images to achieve this, works well enough.
Also works with UTM.
Im running Multipass on M1 for full linux VMs. Are container machines better?
Isn't multiphase is Ubuntu only?
It used to be. Any image is allowed now.
Every time I see Apple flaunting Linux containers I can hardly consider it as anything but admitting defeat. It could easily be Darwin, if they still had the capacity.
Just change 30 years of internet history
For what it's worth, the first web server was a NeXTcube, and NeXTSTEP was the foundation of macOS.
What is the alternative? They gave up the server market a decade ago and before that they barely actually supported it.
If they were to support darwin containers, what would be the point? Literally nobody would build to it, Linux won.
> Literally nobody would build to it
because nobody does ci/cd against macOS or iOS apps right?
And what is the revenue stream tied to that ci/cd pipeline they aren’t capturing today? Apple would sell less hardware in order to…?
There aren’t any app developers avoiding the Apple ecosystem because there aren’t Darwin containers. They don’t sell server hardware and by all accounts have no intention of ever reentering that space. So they’d spend a bunch of developer cycles to reduce their own revenue stream with no apparent upside beyond “goodwill” which they’ve never been overly concerned about.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by the same logic, you could also say this whole containerization framework is of no use either.
If they're investing resources into it regardless, they might at least try making something that Docker for macOS and co. haven't solved the same exact way already. Something that, due to their almost unhealthy obsession with "system integrity", only they can realistically make. Like native containers.
Supporting the containerization framework lets them sell more laptops to Linux devs that may have otherwise bought a Dell or hp or insert brand to run Linux natively on or windows with WSL.
Containers are REALLY REALLY popular. This is a a great value add for developers on Mac who need to deal with Linux containers.
Which is a ton of ‘em.
They already support this scenario with XCode Cloud, it is only a market for those that don't want to pay Apple for it.
Apple set itself up for defeat in the server and developer marketplace as soon as they decided macOS was proprietary code.
Why would any serious developer use closed-source code they can't debug and modify? Especially for a production server?
It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS, like part of the point of being a developer is being able to dig into the code at any layer and debug and fix things.
No offense, but serious developers don’t think this way at all.
For server side, which I believe is the context here, Linux and open source are king.
Even Microsoft gave up on Windows and just runs Linux most things except niche cases. Heck, even SQL Server which is expensive piece of machinery got ported to Linux and that's the default target now in their docs.
With that said, one can't deny Apple's success on the b2c side of things so it feels wrong to call their strategy a failure.
Except the cloud isn't open source, the ones that matter to developers that is.
Which is why so many projects get burned with their license choices.
I don't see how this comment is relevant to parent's point. Sure, cloud is proprietary. But it is Linux for the vast majority.
Which is an Pyrrhic victory, when Linus and other founders are long gone, most of this generation actually, what will subsist are proprietary forks, just like what happened with UNIX System V.
OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.
That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.
I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.
> Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard
Apple uses OpenBSD's Packet Filter [1]; I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem. Back in the Snow Leopard days, it was FreeBSD's IPFW, which is also no slouch.
Whatever a firewall can do, PF can do it.
You can also get a nice GUI for PF [2].
[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html
[2]: https://www.murusfirewall.com/murus/
> OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.
"Exploring Darwin and PureDarwin: The Open-Source Foundation of Apple's Operating Systems" - https://machaddr.substack.com/p/exploring-darwin-and-puredar...
Apparently game, desktop and app devs aren't serious.
> It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS
I know I'm basically taking the bait, but I guess I've not been "seriously" developing stuff for the past decade or two, which is news to me!
With colima I can run AMD64 (x86) Linux containers in my Arm64 too. I think this is strictly for Arm64 Linux VMs, or is there some way to run x86 with this too?
Rosetta should be supported
Not for long!
Very unlikely to lose support for Rosetta for Linux. Maybe just Rosetta 2 for mac apps.
What’s the performance when you do that?
You can run amd64 binaries inside an aarch64 Linux virtual machine. Although they're not supporting Rosetta for macOS apps from macOS 27, the Rosetta support in Virtualization Framework will remain.
WWDC presentation video:
Discover container machines
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/389/
Is this going to be good for AOSP builds on Macs?
"LXC" for macOS?
Would be cool if you can redirect USB devices to the VM.
We just released this in OrbStack :) https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/usb
Blog post soon
Yeah I find this useful for redirecting storage/sdcard*, so you can format linux filesystems or use other tools.
* need a usb sdcard reader for macbook pro cause the builtin is not usb)
We're working on block device passthrough for the builtin SD reader.
Thank you for sharing this - I looked into OrbStack a few months ago, and this was the reason I didn't use it (as my primary purpose was to have an external wifi adapter for wifi pwnage).
What happened to Orbstack for like 9 months until earlier this year? Suddenly everything went silent for a bit and I was pretty concerned. Glad y’all are back!!!!
Agreed! There's some good improvements around Accessory Access in virtualization framework this year also - checkout: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/224/?time=2...
I wonder if the custom virtio can be used to support attaching the built-in sdcard readers on macs which aren't exposed as usb.
I've successfully tinkered with USB/IP with Apple containers, but it does require loading a custom kernel (which they make pretty easy, thankfully). On the host side, macOS also doesn't make it easy to unload a driver that attaches automatically.
Can Podman support these eventually?
Sounds like toolbox or distrobox for Mac!
I know its not going to be there but wish we had Windows as well.
Install Windows 11 ARM under the macOS "UTM" App. This lets you run x86 Windows programs on Apple silicon.
WSL-like implementation on macOS?
Just curious, Apple seems to copy orbstack.. haven’t they made an offer to acquire you guys?
Would be nice if they also support Intel based macs, what prevents?
Allocation of a finite amount of engineering resources.
And a legitimate business interest to further incentivize the adoption of Apple Silicon devices. Same with Rosetta deprecation after macOS 27.
> a legitimate business interest to further incentivize the adoption of Apple Silicon devices
Apple has never been about supporting legacy platforms with new features. And with over a quarter of revenue and two fifths of Apple's gross profits coming from services, one could argue the incentives run either way.
Rosetta 2. Rosetta was for Intel to emulate 68k, now if you could get Rosetta 2 to run under Rosetta, then you could run 68k, on an ARM, and if you could get the apple ][ emulator...
Rosetta 1 was for emulating PPC not 68k
Sure, but to what extent?
Enterprise ARM servers are still a niche product, and so are the ARM developer machines running Linux or Windows. Until this significantly changes, Apple will have to provide good x86 interop - or lose the developer market entirely.
Forcing people towards Apple silicon is of course an attractive approach when targeting the large portion of the market using their MacBooks as Facebook browsing machines, but (especially with the new MacBook Neo) what's going to happen when a large portion of the market for high-end MBPs disappears because it turned from the default no-brainer into a liability?
> Until this significantly changes, Apple will have to provide good x86 interop - or lose the developer market entirely.
I'm very, very skeptical of this analysis. Certainly "entirely" is hyperbole.
That’s a joke right? I’ve been developing software deployed on x86 servers on ARM Macs ever since they were released.
Apple won’t support them with MacOS 27, and it seems they announced this tool as part of this year’s WWDC.
Basically: they’ve moved on.
The underlying Virtualization Framework works on Intel Macs, but they'll miss out on new features landing in macOS 27 and beyond.
Yeah but sitting in the tweak circles just to gather personal data about people to make them lose their minds is no bueno. Otipolfueriborsklineypoo
What FS mounts the Mac drives into the Linux container ?
Is this similar to what cygwin was for windows? Could this be an alternative to homebrew?
It was unclear to me, is this a native replacement for docker? I like docker (on mac) but its quite the resource hog.
I usually run like a db, redis, maybe something like rabbitmq/zeromq and have a app that uses these services (makefile/docker-compose).
I would love to switch if this in fact is a lightweight replacement.
On the one hand yes, on the other hand there are already multiple lighter alternatives to docker on mac.
I saw the video on this this is distrobox basically for Mac. It’s very cool. Seamless with your local files and the container. I’m very keen to try it.
Can macOS be run as a container machine on macOS?
Yes
Yep. For a few years. And they keep enhancing it too.
It’s the only legal way to do so, due to the software license on MacOS.
darwin containers when?
looks like apple wrote a native docker in swift
you can now run linux containers on your mac
... but it could be better.
what about (totally contrived):
Nice, but expect to page through a few pages of ToS during the build
lol
Close - but it would be more like this:
(And indecently slow.)
i wish!
It would be wonderful if this ran on older versions of macOS, but according to the README they only support 26.
you do not understand... Not run on, run IN :)
I'm saying the older version of macos could build/run INSIDE the container
just like on a ubuntu 24.04 system you can do:
or
and though I haven't tried it, I believe docker can do arm in x86 using an emulator (like rosetta)
You can already run older versions of macOS inside a VM on macOS.
So it seems like in theory that should be doable if someone just made the container images right?
so basically dockers
haven't we had hypervisor.framework for like years now?
that thepolfus and the Otis and the bors and the alschweid and pretty much anyone in old the the gs gangstalk or just getting people info to sit in the same room as them to try and makr them go crazy deserve to brave hart quartered
try unplugging your keyboard and then plugging it back in
I found it hard to believe I didn’t have a simple way of staying safe by installing an arbitrary application in a sandbox on macOS. (Restoring using Time Machine doesn’t count! :) )
This is a step in the right direction but requires any given developer’s buy-in first, right?