My main dev machine is Linux so I use Rancher Desktop but I also have a MacBook Pro m1 machine. Orbstack is so much better than rancher and docker desktop. I know they are a small company but hell if their product isn’t significantly more efficient and better.

Completely agree. I moved from docker desktop to rancher after an update blew away my kubernetes cluster, and then from Rancher to Orbstack due to a number of bugs that were crashing the underlying VM. Orbstack has been rock solid (aside from one annoying networking issue), and it uses significantly less battery. They’ve done a fantastic job.

Only complaint is that my home network assigns IPv6 addresses and that fucks up external dns lookups for pods in Orbstack.

Podman-Desktop is also great b/c it now has gpu support on macOS (for the Linux container)

I could not get LocalStack to run on Podman (w/ Docker emulation), on Fedora, so had to go back to Docker.

Love to hear that :) sent you an email about the k8s IPv6 issue — should be able to get it fixed in OrbStack

Why not use Docker CE if you're on Linux?

Related to image format, has anyone tried to use alternative image formats? There was a differnt format / filesystem for containers to leverage deduplication between different images (so the node won't need to fetch yet another copy of cuda / pytorch)

This is common in the Bazel community.