How does this compare to Docker?

[JakeMalis]

Hi! I've been messing around and this seems awesome so far. Just curious about what features are present in Docker but missing from this? Also, will this be installed by default for new Macs shipping with macOS 26?

[matthiasdebernardini]

I am curious about this as well, can I use this to run postgres locally to test my dev builds? Is it easier to do that?

[Jtango18]

FWIW I'm doing exactly with with an X^$ MSSQL workload and it works a treat!

[ndlanier]

Having a discussion in an issue on the minikube repo that is requesting apple container support for minikube. Things like support CRI and Docker API are missing.
Thinking about this from any kubernetes angle and it's very young in terms of ability.

kubernetes/minikube#20933 (comment)

[afbjorklund]

You can run Kubernetes on top of this Apple VM just fine, the main issues are systemd support in vminitd and vxlan support in kernel - but those can be worked around, by using openrc instead for the init and using host-gw for the cluster network.

• run kubernetes #81

Running Docker Compose or Kubernetes Pods on top of Apple Containers (as virtual machines) still has a long way to go though, as you are saying. But for something more similar to WSL, it should not be too far off? Until then, there is: Lima.

• Is it any better than `lima`? #106