I would love to be able to use docker outside of Vagrant in OSX. Right now this is not possible. What are the specific reasons causing it not to be limited for linux installations only?
Docker can now be installed as a native Windows or native Mac app, launched and utilized from a system toolbar just like any other packaged application.
Docker image was built in only seven minutes on MacBook M1 Pro, which was even better than the build time on my new VPS. This is not surprising, I gave Docker quite a lot of resources. But it also shows that if there are not too many I/O disk operations, performance is quite good.
Docker for Mac is a game changer. Docker for Mac is the latest offering for Mac which runs as a native OS X application and uses xhyve to virtualize the Docker Engine environment and Linux kernel-specific features. Why is this so great? Because Docker for Mac allows you to easily run Docker as a native app on your Mac.
Docker is just an abstraction & automation layer on top of system-provided containers.
The technical limitation is that OS X does not support operating system-level virtualization, like containers in Linux or jails in FreeBSD (even despite the fact that OS X is a half-blood BSD).
But even despite that, Docker aims to provide an easy way to share container images, and to make sure that any Docker image would work on any Docker-compatible system, they had to limit it only to Linux. (That is probably why Docker doesn't support FreeBSD and friends, which do have containers.)
UPDATE: you can use projects like docker-osx or boot2docker to enjoy Docker on your OS X machine almost seamlessly (both create a Linux virtual machine behind the scenes.)
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