About
OrbStack is a fast, light Mac app for running Docker containers and Linux. It is presented as a drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop, and the site says you can get started with Linux machines in about 1 minute using the app or the command line. It starts in seconds and includes turbocharged networking, Rosetta x86 emulation, and VirtioFS file sharing.
OrbStack is built to be light on your machine. The site reports less than 0.1% background CPU usage on Apple Silicon, less than 10 MB of disk space used out of the box, and minimal memory consumption. It is a native Swift app that you can manage from the menu bar or Activity Monitor.
OrbStack also supports Linux machines with 16 Linux distros, SSH agent forwarding, and remote SSH editing with VS Code. You can run containers, Kubernetes, and Linux distros, with USB passthrough, isolated sandboxes for untrusted code, and IPv6, and it is described as VPN-friendly. Everything can also be done from the command line, including running commands and copying files between Mac and Linux.
What's new
All release notesHomebrew cask orbstack 2.2.5,21124 (sha256 f2b887d26a21e0a12147eb005297782794b26f461f77c6b9cdfb57f576ad5e6d).