I develop exclusively on Linux, but it would be nice if my teammates who don't didn't melt their laptops doing local dev on mac.

If apple gave a shit about non apple developers they would provide the kernel hooks to help make it possible.

Also, nobody deploys on mac hosts because virtualizing macos in a cloud environment is against tos, so options are expensive and limited.

I mean, they do provide the hooks via Hypervisor.framework. I'm not 100% familiar, but if it's anything like KVM then running a linux VM like that shouldn't have that much overhead.

I deploy on linux, but dev on macOS without a vm or docker or anything. If you're not doing anything OS dependant, which most web apps don't, you can run everything natively.

Isolation is another important reason people use docker.

I don't want my developers to have to manage a complex dev stack and it's dependencies.

I would argue that this is the primary use case for local docker dev these days.

Me and I just about everyone I know that has a mac develops _for_ Linux. What is nice is that I can push, pull and run Linux images on my mac.

If the containers where native Macos docker images it would be about as useful as native Docker on Windows. Which I'm sure is great for the few ppl that need it - but pretty useless for most ppl.

But I sure wouldn't mind if was a bit snappier. But it is plenty fast enough for my needs atm.

I believe they would just need to virtualize what isn't already provided by xnu-darwin.

This may already be the case, but the memory allocation for docker vm on mac really handicaps things.