Apple has a CLI for running Linux containers on macOS now. It’s called container, and the part I care about is that it doesn’t need Docker Desktop.
The design choice that makes it interesting: there’s no single shared Linux VM that every container piles into. Each container gets its own lightweight VM. So you get real isolation for free, boots are quick, and it all sits on top of Apple’s Containerization Swift package. Images are plain OCI, so the registries and the pull/build/push workflow you already know carry over. The requirements are stricter than I’d like, though: Apple silicon, macOS 26 or newer.
You install it from a signed package on the releases page, then start the background service. The service is where I tripped.
Run anything before it’s up and you get this:
❯ container machine create --name dev --set-default fedora:latest
Error: interrupted: "XPC connection error: Connection invalid"
Ensure container system service has been started with `container system start`.
❯ container system start
Launching container-apiserver...
Testing access to container-apiserver...
Verifying machine API server is running...
No default kernel configured.
Install the recommended default kernel from [https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/releases/download/3.28.0/kata-static-3.28.0-arm64.tar.zst]? [Y/n]: y
Installing kernel...XPC connection error: Connection invalid is not a bug. The system service just isn’t running. Start it with container system start, say yes to the default kernel, and you’re good.
Docker Desktop on a Mac has always felt like more machinery than I needed. This is lighter. Give it a spin.