HACKER Q&A
📣 quintes

Best way to build and run containers on Mac M1


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 Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 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).
👤 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.
👤 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.