MacOS 26: Natural Container support is happy-and not just that

Developer, advanced amateurs and/or hobbyists love containers: This makes it possible to operate isolated environments with new systems and apps without disturbing the main operating system. Apple makes users with MacOS 26 alias Tahoe, which is supposed to be released in autumn, now a nice gift: a containerization framework installed directly in the operating system makes work easier.

Linux-VM brisk on the Mac

“The containerization framework enables developers to create, download or execute Linux Container images directly on the Mac. It is based on an open source framework optimized for Apple Silicon and offers secure insulation between container images,” writes the group in his announcement. Open Source means here: Apple has developed it, but releases the code. The new framework is likely to have advantages in system load distribution: If you use the usual docker for your containers, this potentially draws a lot of electricity, as there must be several insulation and virtualization layers. The direct competitor Orbstack Does that better, but of course he cannot work as possible as a system as Apple’s own framework.

As Xe Iaso, Ceo from Techaro from Ottawa writes in a blog post, Apple could use it to form a Mac Even better development environment Make that is platform neutral. The hope is that the containerization framework Linux-VMS will perform significantly resource-saving in the future. A developer at Heise Online summarizes this as follows: “Apple thus quickly provides an OCI-compliant container support. A lightweight VM runs in the background.” However, this is a container level, not VM level, “what has existed so far”.

Remain questions (still)

It is now interesting how Orbstack reacts, the docker is already overtaken in terms of performance. It is also unclear how quickly Apple’s framework becomes the network and file system access. According to the documentation, there are still some restrictions here. It is also interesting whether the command is really available by default or – for example with Xcode – has to be installed.

As mentioned, Apple’s containerization framework is source. On Github You can already look around how the implementation takes place. Above all, Xe Iaso wants to know how economical the framework really is-for example when you have an Nginx container in the background. It is also still unclear whether GPU-APIs, Kubernetes and Rosetta (for X86 apps) are supported. MacOS 26 is already available as a developer beta, so hopefully there should be answers to the open questions.