OrbStack is impressive on the performance and energy efficiency fronts. I'm not aware of anything that comes close. But they're doing something funky under the covers. You can't just start any OS in a VM. It has to be somehow mangled to suit their VM. Thankfully NixOS is available so I'm fine for my use cases. It's still remarkable how efficient it is.
Yeah, it's like WSL. It starts just one VM and then your individual "machines" are LXC containers underneath. If you peek at the vendor-supplied file your NixOS OrbStack Machine includes you can see some of it.
They're constantly doing other optimizations in other ways, too. But that's the one you were pointing at, I think.
OrbStack isn't open-source though and I can't justify buying a license for every single person in my company just for something functionally equivalent but performing better.
These kinds of things should just be provided by Apple as a first-class thing.
OrbStack is impressive on the performance and energy efficiency fronts. I'm not aware of anything that comes close. But they're doing something funky under the covers. You can't just start any OS in a VM. It has to be somehow mangled to suit their VM. Thankfully NixOS is available so I'm fine for my use cases. It's still remarkable how efficient it is.
Yeah, it's like WSL. It starts just one VM and then your individual "machines" are LXC containers underneath. If you peek at the vendor-supplied file your NixOS OrbStack Machine includes you can see some of it.
They're constantly doing other optimizations in other ways, too. But that's the one you were pointing at, I think.
That's also what Colima does.
OrbStack isn't open-source though and I can't justify buying a license for every single person in my company just for something functionally equivalent but performing better.
These kinds of things should just be provided by Apple as a first-class thing.