hyperkit

WSL is really interesting. I switched to the Mac in 2006 but I’ve never really used the fact it’s built on Unix much because it’s so different and frankly outdated comparede to the Linux systems I work on. When I want to do ‘Unixy’ stuff at home I run a Linux VM in VirtualBox. But WSL seems to offer the best of both worlds – a solid mature desktop environment with plenty of well supported professional level apps and an approaching first class Linux environment baked right in. I’m still very happy on the Mac and would miss a lot of Mac specific features and applications, but this is the first thing to happen in Windows Land that’s made me even think of the possibility of wanting to run Windows at home for over 10 years. Edit: What would be the nearest thing to WSL on a Mac? VirtualBox is a bit heavy-weight. Maybe something based on Hyperki

Docker has taken the direction of a loose collection of tools tied together by an integrated interface. So you have the choice of using the platform as a whole, or standing up your choice of individual components on their own, without any dependency on Docker. Based on your comment, you're probably not the target audience for the platform. I recommend checking out some of the components to see if they meet your criteria of simplicity. A few examples: https://runc.io https://containerd.tools https://github.com/docker/swarmkit https://github.com/docker/notary https://github.com/docker/infrakit https://github.com/docker/hyperkit We are continuing the work of carving out more and more usable components from the platform.

Mac OS X has an hypervisor framework, which is also used by Docker https://github.com/docker/hyperkit https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor Also there is App Sandbox for writing safer applications, but it requires programming explicitly against it. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Se...