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
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