Ask HN: Best way to build and run containers on Mac M1

[quintes]

Hey all

I’ve just upgraded to Sonoma and have fallen out of touch with dev skills(I’m an Architect and been operating in the strategic sphere for a while but once was technical)

Wanting to build Llm and other things, so expecting ollama but also containers and databases. I see myself running a container or 3 so want a good workflow and set of tooling.

Are you running k3s, rancher desktop, or just Lima/Colima?

Also I realised I’d broken my brew install - I had it running in my primary Mac user account but created a standard user to reduce privileges and installed brew again and it broke (multi user issues I get it now!)

So I want to work as the standard user (adding account as sudoer) to seperate my user accounts. Is that what you do?

[tkiolp4]

I use multipass to run Ubuntu VMs in my M1. Inside these VMs I run docker containers. I mainly use VMs to keep my Mac “clean” (I don’t wanna install, let’s say npm or go or whatever directly on my Mac).

Performance wise: I have several VMs running, and everything is fast.

[quintes → tkiolp4]

Thank you I was hoping to hear if this was an option

[solarkraft]

I like Orbstack (orbstack.dev) as a light-weight Docker Desktop alternative. It also supports full VMs and k8s, I believe (but I never tried that).

[quintes → solarkraft]

Thanks I’ll need to look at their offering. Closed source right?

[cpach]

For running containers, I went with Lima+Debian+Docker Engine. It works quite well. I interact with Docker by simply connecting to the VM via SSH and the doing ‘docker run’ etc.

[quintes → cpach]

Thank you. So to ensure I understand - docker inside a Debian vm? Keeps the host clean I like it

[cpach → quintes]

Exactly!

[speedgoose]

If you want to use ollama, run it natively and not through a Linux VM for better performance.

Otherwise I use Colima, that can include k3s as an option.

[quintes → speedgoose]

Thanks for the tip on performance