lima (linux on macos) is a VM management tool CLI frontend which can use QEMU or Virtualization.framework as a backend, colima (containers on linux on macos) is leveraging lima to set up a linux vm to handle linux containers straight from macos (including host-vm shares, port forwardong to the vm, etc...)

If you want to draw some very coarse comparisons with big names, lima is like VMware Fusion, colima is like the Docker for Mac app.

colima kind of fills one of the use cases of docker-machine which kind of died as this use case was handled by DfM and the other use case (handling machines for swarm) was folded into docker swarm and docker compose.

No, Lima just sets up a VM for you. Colima is a wrapper around Lima that can configure a Docker daemon and context for you. You still need the Docker CLI to use Docker.

That's what I thought at first but the comments here confused me by mixing in Docker everywhere.

Generally when using docker on a Mac you are actually running linux containers, so you need a linux virtual machine.

Colima is a low-configuration command line tool to spin up a linux VM (using Lima) which includes docker support, so you can run docker commands in the Mac terminal but the containers actually run in the linux VM.

You still have to install the actual docker CLI tool separately via Homebrew etc. Colima just provides everything else.

This is also what happens generally when you install and run Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows, I just like Colima because it’s a much lighter installation and doesn’t come with the commercial paid license requirement of Docker Desktop.

My understanding is that Colima is based on such a front-end, but Lima is not.