Lima launches Linux virtual machines (QEMU) with automatic file sharing, port forwarding (similar to WSL2) and built-in support for containerd (Other container engines can be used too).

The original goal of Lima was to promote containerd including nerdctl (contaiNERD ctl) to Mac users, but Lima can be used for non-container applications as well. Lima also supports non-macOS hosts (Linux, NetBSD, etc.).

Advantages compared to Docker for Mac?

Lima is free software (Apache License 2.0), while Docker for Mac is not.

See also:

• https://lima-vm.io/docs/faq/colima/ Colima is a third-party project that wraps Lima to provide an alternative user experience for launching containers. The key difference is that Colima launches Docker by default, while Lima launches containerd by default.