This is focused on builds, so running either buildkitd or dockerd in an Apple containerization container.
No port forwarding or host volume stuff (really its focused on running buildkit on mac) BUT complete integration with docker CLI and buildx.
Yeah. I don't quite understand this. Can I use this instead of docker desktop, to run docker containers on my mac 'natively' ? Or this is completely separate from docker ?
I am not sure what you mean by "completely separate from docker." I have been using Container for some time now, and oddly enough, it was my first real exposure to using containers. I can say this much though:
1. I do not have docker anything installed anywhere on my mac. I run LLMs CLI tools out of containers with mounted directories. Absolutely zero issues in my workflow for me.
2. I can pull images from docker hub and run them with no issue, if that is what you want. x86 arch'ed containers will require Rosetta, so I only use AArch64 compatible containers.
3. Be warned, Container has some weird incompatibilities with macOS's mDNSResponder, so you might have to finagle things a bit if you need to run a VPN that uses port 53 while running a container via Container, for example.
My experience of docker is running docker-compose, which uses docker desktop on Windows . I can use apple containers instead of docker to achieve the same thing? it's sounds like it.
Yes, this is a separate runtime. Docker handles containerization differently with more overhead. OCI is a 'standard' way of constructing container images and both are compatible with OCI.
https://github.com/cpuguy83/crucible