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

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 compilation natively. Needless to say, the kinds of performance benefits I was seeing with OrbStack were game changers, and absolutely justify the cost.

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

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

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

I have been happily using OrbStack for a while now, and I've had nothing but good experiences. The UI is polished and responsive, the containers have great performance and nice integration with the host, and overall the product seems to be constantly pushing itself to be even better.

I admit my greatest confusion about this software is how a product that appears to be a one-man show so quickly became more compelling than the well-funded incumbent (Docker Desktop). This is even more impressive considering that the developer appears to be a college student.

Hats off, this is amazing work.

I switched to Orbstack about 2 weeks ago after having read about it here on HN.

I develop a cloud native system entirely writen in Rust. All my own containers are build without Docker thanks to rules oci in Bazel. However, for integration testing, I'm using internal tools that fire up, say a database container and run the tests all from within Bazel to leverage test caching and parallelization.

For a while, i was struggling to get around Dockers slow startup time on Mac. My CI server uses Firecracker VM's to isolate OCI containers so it's really only a docker on Mac issue.

My main take away:

- I am so close to delete Docker permanently. There is no comparison, not even close. All integration tests run so much faster.

- Especially parallel container starts a noticable faster.

- I've developed custom docker utils for testing and, believe me, the official Docker API is a humongous pile of garbage that I ended up re-implementing everything by wrapping the Docker command line. To nobody's surprise, even the custom docker utils work way faster and more reliable with OrbStack.

- Zero issues. I am still a little bit puzzled that OrbStack basically runs bug-free no matter what I throw at it. Take it as a compliment.

What I would like to see:

- A Ressource monitor or at least some graph that plots CPU and memory usage. In some rare cases the application in the container runs close to the limit probably because a query takes too long, a process got stuck or whatever. Stuff just happenens. Point is, having an eye on ressource usage helps to spot those corner cases early on.

For me, OrbStack is a clear win and a clear keeper. Well done Orb team and I wish you guys all the success in the world.

OrbStack is great in a lot of ways, and I universally prefer it over Docker for Mac.

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.

I love how there is absolutely no mention that it is mac-only (or even what versions of mac are supported), even on the download page.

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

OrbStack is by far some of the best software I've encountered on Mac, but unfortunately I have difficulty convincing my employer to pay for a commercial license, and with my sparse Docker usage, I'm confined to using it only for personal/hobby usage.

What's amazing is it fixes an (almost) show stopper bug when using libuv (or software that uses it like CMake) with Rosetta 2 [1], with the bug present on all Docker/VMs I've tried except OrbStack. It just seems to get everything right.

[1]: https://github.com/libuv/libuv/issues/4279

Nice to see this here :)

I work on OrbStack. Happy to answer questions!

Have been using OrbStack since beta and with a commercial license since February. I can’t praise it enough, it’s elegant, performant software that just works.

kdrag0n's first post about this on HN, afaict: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34100779

Amazing how far they've got since, in just two years. As others have pointed out, it's already "boring" software in that it just works. And that's no small feat because this kind of tool requires all kinds of low-level hackery to make work, and make work fast. Hats off!

(Happy user here if you couldn't tell.)

Orbstack is great. I use it in order to build a library cross-platform (Linux/Mac amd64/aarch64 all combinations) and it's great how I can do it on my Mac. You can even run a quick shell in a VM that has all your stuff mounted. Perfect user experience.

OrbStack has been an absolute lifesaver. Rancher Desktop was great for running a quick K3s cluster locally, but OrbStack's VMs are just great. For someone who likes to run separate envs on Linux, Orb's VMs are great. Pretty performant on my older M1 MBP too.

It would be handy if it mentioned somewhere near the top of the front page that OrbStack is a macOS utility.

So that Linux & Windows people know they can look away. (Looks like a cool tool though!)

I have been using OrbStack for 8 months now for personal use. I haven’t experienced a single issue in that time, and use it daily.

Can’t say that for much software to be honest.

It's not as battery-hungry as official Docker desktop. That's the main reason I switched to it. Now, I'm happier than before.

I love that you can simply type `orb` and get dropped into a Linux vm. Some of the cpu features are super weird (cat /proc/cpuinfo and it is unlike literally any x86 cpu I've seen before), but unless you happen to build stuff that depends on lots of specific cpu features like I do, it works well enough.

Happy user since day one. Since adopting Orbstack most of our frustrations with Docker on Mac OS are gone.

OrbStack is great for me on MacOS and nothing else I tried comes close.

I'm not sure I fully understand the technical differences between an OrbStack VM and a container, as both seem to use a shared kernel.

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

Err, you guys know that about 80% of desktops are Windows right? There's a bit of a myth that developers are all using macOS but in practice that's not really the case.

Wished they had a Nix package, but looks good I will check it out! (Request to devs please a nix package, nix-darwin is very good for defining work machines)

Also a bit more expensive than docker desktop for companies.

Does anyone know if you can run arm64 images on a x86 Linux machine? I'm currently doing it with Docker and QEMU but it is super slow.

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

* On MacOS Hosts only.

I feel like there should be a rule that if the submission is basically a "Show HN" style post (or a link to s piece of software), it should be mentioned in the title if its platform specific.

I’m curious how orbstack is able to achieve the performance they claim.

Great alternative to Docker Desktop on MacOS.

The problem with wsl2 is that it not only requires a virtual machine, but also uses the windows kernel, not the linux kernel

also supports ipv6.