[jchw]

If you find yourself bottlenecked on IO performance, OrbStack is the best. Also a fan of the fact that it has a very similar VM function to WSL2. Also supports using either Rosetta or Qemu for emulation of Intel architecture, and has some kind of Kubernetes integration that I didn't try.

Last I tried Podman Desktop, it was OK, but had worse performance than Docker and was a little rougher around the edges. Still, not bad.

Colima is probably fine, but I had issues that were showstoppers for me. Trying to get it to consistently start up correctly in a CI environment seemed oddly challenging, and it doesn't seem to support IPv6 at all. YMMV.

Have not tried Rancher Desktop.

[campbel]

I did evals of most of the popular ones for my company and my opinion is OrbStack is best performance and most reliable. The Kubernetes integration is also very nice and resetting it takes about ~10s in case you get in a pickle.