Apple just made Docker Desktop optional on Mac.
And it is completely free.
This is apple/container. 26.5k stars no Github.
You can now run Linux containers natively on your Mac without installing Docker Desktop, without a background daemon hogging your RAM, and without paying $21 a month per developer for a commercial license.
Here is what it does:
→ Runs Linux containers as lightweight VMs directly on Apple Silicon using macOS 26 virtualization
→ Fully OCI compatible. Pull any image from Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry or anywhere else
→ Written in Swift and optimised specifically for Apple Silicon. Faster and lighter than anything Docker Desktop does on Mac
→ Standard container CLI syntax. If you know Docker commands you already know how to use this
→ Push images you build to any standard container registry and run them anywhere
Docker Desktop charges $21 per developer per month for commercial use. Apple's version costs nothing and ships as open source under Apache-2.0.
Microsoft made Docker Desktop optional on Windows with WSL Containers last month.
Apple just did the same on Mac.
Docker is not going anywhere. But the era of paying for a GUI wrapper around containers on your own machine is quietly ending.
Repo here: https://t.co/uFJ867sul6
The loudest story about AI is a lonely one. One person with an army of chatbots. Other humans are friction.
That gets the future wrong. The best things aren’t built alone.
In a moment of change, we want to remind the world (and ourselves) what Notion stands for:
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