colima

As another commenter mentioned, Colima is a good alternative to Docker Desktop if you're looking.

Been using Colima to run mixed architecture container stacks in docker compose on my M3 Mac and the machine barely blinks.

The best alternative to Docker Desktop on macOS is to abandon the GUI entirely use colima to create the linux VM.

I was using Colima before and then the Linux laptop was running the integration test suite ~60% faster.

It doesn't expose container IPs either, but docker-mac-net-connect does support Colima ootb now.

There are teams building actual sandboxes like smolmachines, podman, colima and mre.

If you're on linux and have kvm, there's Lima and Colima too.

It works through Docker Desktop, Orb Stack, or Colima on macOS.

Use either Docker Desktop or Colima for the VM + Docker.

If you need a UI, colima is probably too barebones.

To be clear, colima isn't a fork of docker.

I’ve fought Colima before and ran it within there but the host/vm permissions for editing files in a projects folder were a pain.

It was along the lines of "try to install colima with macports, look at errors, apply a fix".

Colima is a simple wrapper around Lima, which is a simple wrapper around qemu or Apple's virtualization layer.

Colima is backed by qemu, not Rosetta, so if Rosetta disappeared tomorrow I don't think I'd notice.

Colima I appreciate for its full headless nature but it's severely behind in performance, sadly.