pull down to refresh

This was posted over a year ago, but @nicktee has been gloating about how much more efficient it is on their Mac recently. I work on a MacBook Air with only 24GB of RAM most of the time, so Docker Desktop's memory usage tends to be a problem when running SN's development environment (25 containers when the whole hog is configured). That, combined with way too many browser tabs and an electrum-based IDE, causes a memory pinch.
I just replaced Docker Desktop with OrbStack but I'm already seeing reduced memory pressure.
While I wish I had installed it at first zap, I didn't expect to receive better performance running Docker containers with something that isn't Docker Desktop. But it is better. Orbstack is using a more native linux subsystem on MacOS that they say is WSL-like. So for its underlying linux vm, Orbstack is using a type 1-like hypervisor1 while Docker Desktop is using an old fashioned(?) type 2 hypervisor.
Orbstack is probably the best thing for running docker on Mac until/unless MacOS adds Linux's cgroups.

Footnotes

Been using it almost 2 years now. I use their VM feature and spin up a nix VM with my own nix files configuration and do all of my development in it. Can’t ever go back. My Mac has no dev libraries or programs installed. All my projects manage their own nix dev environment.
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