1mo ago

macOS 26 introduces the Containerization Framework: "enables developers to create, download, or run Linux container images directly on Mac"

www.apple.com

Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers

31 comments

WSL for Mac?
- Yeah pretty much.
- MSL that is.
- I wonder if you could run WSL under Wine...
- Why do you need WSL?
  MacOS is BSD, so you can do most Linux things with an issue. But some of the BSD tools have different options the the GNU tools.
  We moved to Mac years ago and it makes doing almost everything I do a simples
  
  because docker. it hard requires a linux kernel and is extremely slow on mac, just like it was on windows until they integrated with wsl.
  
  No. Mac is NOT BSD. Mac took the BSD user space from 20+ years ago. That's all.
  I'm not sure why this myth keeps being repeated over and over.
  If that's all it takes to "be" BSD, then windows is also BSD since the entire windows network stack was lifted from BSD
That's very cool! But, my work needs to run proprietary x86 containers not ARM ones. We are sadly being "forced" (they rather still not turn to open source software) to move to Windows. It's a shame.
- I haven't checked but it should be possible?
  macOS has had support for x64 binaries in Linux VMs for a few years now, using their Rosetta 2 translation layer.
  
  I've been using colima for x64 emulation. This blog talks a little bit about it, but basically you start colima in either arm or x64 mode and then can run that type of image - https://blog.barakimam.me/running-vs-code-devcontainers-with-x8664-runtime-on-apple-silicon
  
  the performance isn't there yet, unfortunately.
- Linux isn't an option?
like a macpak?
I wonder if this opens up any new opportunities for cool Distrobox usecases.
- You can already sort of hack distrobox-like functionality, but the biggest problem with doing so is that there's no Wayland or X11 server running on macOS, so GUI applications don't work unless you install something like XQuartz, and even then, it's a pretty janky experience.
I looks like it only allows 1 virtual machine at a time so docker-compose wouldn't work
- Docker to my knowledge still requires a real Linux running somewhere, somehow. In MacOS, it has traditionally been some sort of a VM running under the hood via docker-machine. As this is ~~emulation~~virtualization, it has a rather severe overhead.
  This containerization framework sounds like it might enable a more light-weight version of Linux, somewhat similar to what Windows has had via WSL for some time.
  
  docker-machine doesn't use emulation, it's virtualization.
So Apple computers actually turn useful?
I hope I can run ollama in a container with full power, can't install it natively on my work computer
- Still uses VMs, although it's 1 VM per container.

31 comments