lima-vm

lima

Go2021–2026

lima-vm / lima

lima

Linux virtual machines, with a focus on running containers

Systems & Infrastructure Mobile & Desktop

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68Distinct people

78Mentions

2Explicit recommenders

22.3KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Linux virtual machines, with a focus on running containers

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I recommend looking at Lima for setting up deterministic build environments on a Mac! I use it with Ansible to provision testing environments: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

bonsai_spool used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

abiosoft/colima · linked in 5 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:59:22 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year78 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-05-14 08:19:47 UTC to 2026-10-12 09:44:47 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	11	4	7
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	30	1	29
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	17	0	17
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	8	1	7
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	9	1	8
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3

What Hacker News says

30 sources

zamalek·Nov 28, 2022

> slow ass filesystem always ruined it in the past. Make sure that you're running a recent version of Lima, and use a 9p mount. Edit: by editing one of these yamls: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/tree/master/examples

In LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

gpanders·Nov 27, 2022

Last I checked (which was not that long ago), Lima was stuck using 9p because QEMU for Darwin didn’t yet support virtiofs. Has this changed? Or maybe I’m just misremembering the details… EDIT: Looks like this was indeed just added in the last couple of weeks https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/commit/c18ae239b69a47db77436...

In LXD containers on macOS at near-native speeds

mark_l_watson·Nov 20, 2022

That is cool. Satisfying to figure out an optimization like that! A little off topic, but on my M1 Macs I have been using Lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima to get shells running in a Linux container. Google has done a very good job adding containerization to ChromeOS. I keep a Lenovo Chromebook around for quick access to Linux. I find myself doing this more often than SSHing to a VPS.

In Running Arm64.aarch64 FreeBSD on QEMU/UTM.app on Apple Silicon

mark_l_watson·Nov 19, 2022

I would be tempted to try this but both of my M1 Macs only have 8G of memory. For text/shell only Linux, I have been using https://github.com/lima-vm/lima for the last week and for what I needed (I wanted to setup picolisp and Emacs for some experiments) it was all good.

In VMware Fusion 13 – native support for Apple Silicon Macs

anderspitman·Nov 16, 2022

If this sounds interesting, see https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

In Windows Subsystem For Linux a.k.a. WSL 1.0.0 released

nvln·Sep 21, 2022

1. Editor - VS code (working mostly on Typescript projects these days) - Emacs for org mode / note taking - Jetbrains Rider for Game dev - nvim for, well, vi. 2. Build / Test / Deploy - My mac is completely managed by a Nix / home-manager[1] setup that delegates to homebrew for some apps. - I add a flake.nix to all projects and use the nix devShell[2] with direnv extension to create development environments with custom commands. I played with the flix language[3] (on JVM) briefly and my nix based workflow worked quite well. - I use lima with nerdctl[4] for containerization when required. I have a stalled experiment to use VSCode devcontainers[5]. I unfortunately didn't take notes on that experiment so I don't have a lot to share. All I can remember is that the integration to VSCode was quite impressive but trying to

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get the ergonomics of my local environment replicated required significant effort. - CI: github actions [1]: https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager [2]: https://github.com/numtide/devshell [3]: https://flix.dev [4]: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima [5]: https://containers.dev/overview

In Ask HN: MacBook M1 development workflow?

throwaway888abc·Sep 20, 2022

Lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

In Ask HN: MacBook M1 development workflow?

pickleMeTimbers·Sep 19, 2022

This is also achieved through: 1) https://github.com/lima-vm/lima 2) https://github.com/beringresearch/macpine With a nice CLI included.

In macOS Subsystem for Linux

ksbrooksjr·Sep 8, 2022

It looks like it still is supported [1]. I noticed while reading the Lima documentation that they're planning on switching from SSHFS to 9P [2]. [1] https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup [2] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/blob/3401b97e602083cfc55b34e...

In My VM is lighter (and safer) than your container (2017)

emmelaich·Sep 2, 2022

https://github.com/lima-vm/lima is also excellent

In In Praise of QEMU

ecnahc515·Aug 22, 2022

Were you trying to use more than 8GB of memory? There's an option to pass to qemu for highmem. Could be hitting this issue: https://github.com/lima-vm/lima/issues/713

In QEMU Internals (2021)

sporkland·Jul 31, 2022

Why can't you run docker on your work PC? If it's the licensing issues I'd recommend using lima-vm (https://github.com/lima-vm/lima) as a substitute.

In Kubernetes reinvented virtual machines in a good sense

ksbrooksjr·Jul 9, 2022

Vagrant has a few advantages compared to Rancher (and Lima[1] which I believe Rancher uses under the hood). Because of its popularity, there are so many open source Ruby provisioning scripts you can use as a reference when provisioning your own VMs. You can also package up a provisioned VM as what they call a "box" that can be shared with other developers. It also natively integrates with tools like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet which make it a lot easier to manage the provisioning process. And finally, many of the books and tutorials I've read use Vagrant, so it's much easier to follow along if you have Vagrant installed. For example I was recently reading the book Ansible for Devops by Jeff Geerling, and Vagrant and Virtualbox were used pretty extensively throughout the book. Also, if you decide to package VMs to use in production it's pret

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ty easy to integrate with Packer, which is another Hashicorp product. [1] https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

In Ask HN: What's your experience with working M1 and M2 Macs?

chucky_z·Jul 8, 2022

If you had one early on consider it again. The first 6 months was abysmal for me, but ever since https://github.com/lima-vm/lima has been locked down I have ways to compile everything and run any container I want. `nerdctl` has taken a tiny bit of effort to learn but it's been well worth it.

In Ask HN: What's your experience with working M1 and M2 Macs?

ravenstine·Jun 4, 2022

Wouldn't Lima serve that role? https://github.com/lima-vm/lima If memory serves me right, it works with Podman.

In Docker is dead? Podman – an alternative tool?

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