jakecoffman/lima

Lima lets you run a full Linux environment on your Mac (or Linux machine) without leaving your usual operating system. Think of it as having a Linux computer inside your computer that you can spin up instantly. The main goal is to let Mac users run software containers, the kind of packaged applications that power most modern web services, using an engine called containerd, which serves as an alternative to Docker. When you start the tool, it creates a lightweight virtual machine running a Linux distribution of your choice (Ubuntu by default, but many others are supported). The magic is that it automatically handles the annoying parts of working between two operating systems. Your Mac files are visible and readable inside Linux, and you can even share a specific folder that both systems can edit. If a program running inside the Linux environment opens a web server on a certain port, that port is automatically forwarded to your Mac, so you can view it right in your local browser. You control everything by typing commands like lima followed by whatever you want to run. This is primarily for developers and anyone building software on a Mac who needs to test applications in a Linux environment. For example, if you are building a website, you can use it to run a web server or a database exactly as it would run in production. It is also useful for running tools that only work on Linux, or for testing how your software behaves on different computer architectures, like seeing if your app works on ARM chips while sitting at an Intel Mac. Several other well-known projects actually rely on this tool behind the scenes. For instance, Rancher Desktop and Colima both use it to provide container management on macOS. Notable tradeoffs include a reliance on a virtual machine program called QEMU, which can sometimes be slow or crash on certain setups, and a warning from the developers to back up your data because bugs might occasionally result in file loss.