Colima, revisited

Nine months ago I wrote about settling on Colima with nerdctl for my container workflow on macOS. I didn’t want to fight with my tools. That hasn’t changed. But the tools have their own ideas.

What still works

Colima + nerdctl + nerdctl compose is still a good setup. Lightweight VM, Docker-compatible CLI, no GUI. For everyday stuff — building images, running compose stacks, poking at databases in containers — it’s fine. Multi-platform builds with nerdctl build just work. No buildx headaches. That part of the story hasn’t changed.

Colima added a built-in AI model runner in v0.10 — colima model run gemma3 pulls and runs LLMs locally with GPU acceleration on Apple Silicon. No other lightweight Docker alternative does this out of the box.

What doesn’t

The cracks show once you step outside the happy path.

The VM freezes. Often enough to be annoying. colima stop hangs forever. You nuke it with colima delete and start fresh. On M4 machines this has gotten worse, not better. Others report the same. The underlying Lima VM is the culprit — Colima is a thin wrapper on top and inherits its rough edges. It doesn’t bother me much though. A delete and restart takes seconds.

Volume mounts are slow. This one isn’t really Colima’s fault. Any VM-based approach on macOS pays this tax. But it’s noticeable when you’re running a Node.js dev server with bind-mounted source code. The filesystem round-trip through virtiofs adds up.

None of these are dealbreakers on their own. But they add up. The “I don’t want to fight with my tools” bar gets harder to clear when you’re restarting your VM twice a week.

Podman, round two

I dismissed Podman pretty quickly in my original post. It felt clunky on macOS. The Rosetta setup was weird. It didn’t feel native.

I gave it another shot recently. It’s better than before — VPN passthrough works, DNS isn’t a coin flip, the VM didn’t freeze on me. The machine layer is actively maintained by Red Hat. But it’s still clunky for my taste. The podman machine workflow doesn’t feel as seamless as Colima’s. And podman-compose is a separate project — complex compose files with niche features sometimes don’t translate, while Colima runs actual Docker engine inside the VM so your compose files just work.

Still on Colima

I’m still on Colima. The issues are real and annoying, but the workflow fits me. It’s lighter, the mental model is simpler — it’s just Docker — and for my day to day it stays out of the way.

Podman is what I’d recommend to someone starting fresh who doesn’t have muscle memory tied to docker commands, or someone who needs VPN networking to work. For me, the friction of switching outweighs the friction of the occasional Colima hiccup.

If you want to avoid all of this, OrbStack exists and it’s polished, but it’s paid software and that was never my thing.

Same lesson as last time: pick the tool that fights you the least.