It's a bit disappointing that OrbStack is not open source, but it works really well.
In my experience (co)lima was already an improvement over Docker Desktop in terms of reliability and background resource usage, but OrbStack is even more lightweight. I also do a bit of low-level networking development and Docker Desktop was rewriting some fields of the IP packets (besides NAT translation) which was annoying. It works seamlessly here.
It still has the same VM memory usage issue as other tools (Linux page cache taking more and more memory over time and not releasing it to the host), but they claim it will work correctly once a bug in Virtualization.framework is fixed: https://twitter.com/OrbStack/status/1645782250116505600
Colima/Lima already support more features than OrbStack, and are FOSS, and OrbStack will soon become a paid product (like Docker Desktop), so I would recommend either Colima or Docker Desktop instead.
Please have a personal license that allows commercial use by the licensee, often it's hard to convince your company to get something just for you and I'm happy to pay for a tool I already use so I don't have to context switch. (I did so for Obsidian and Berkeley Mono).
To add to this I have purchased my own Jetbrains All Products subscription for many years now for exactly this reason. I bring my tools with me, I want to use them on commercial products I develop for companies I work for and I don't want the hassle of them trying to license software for me.
This is the status quo for Java tools at the very least, i.e IDEA, YourKit, etc.
Parallels Desktop Pro (no resource limitations): $120/yr
OrbStack: $96/yr
Seems very reasonable, especially for a tool that does most of what Docker Desktop and Parallels do combined (but better in most cases), and it'll only improve over time.
Except Parallels also gives you an entire desktop experience, including the maybe best Windows on ARM experience in existence (thanks to Qualcomm). That is a lot of utility. OrbStack just feels like an upgrade to (co)lima on the other hand that I'd get for the added comfort, nice GUI and marginal performance uplift (though props for having cgroupv2 dockerd). But not because it actually provides capabilities that I can't get elsewhere, from sources where I don't have to consider licensing and building my scripts on top of something someone might not be able to use.
And I'm not sure the comparison with Docker Desktop is warranted. They're basically doing continuity extortion.
