I don't think any of the alternatives support this. applications running in Windows on VirtualBox - without having to remap ports. This lets multiple containers and their services be directly accessible from the host - and e.g. We set up IP aliases on lo0, and bind containers to individual addresses. Nerdctl just learned about registry mirrors like 3 weeks ago, but it looks like it's having containerd do the pull so it would be in the same boat. Broke with Docker Desktop for Mac 4.4.2 as well, and tbh I can't explain why it ever worked, but it did. as it's initiating connections from inside the VM, which doesn't see the SSH tunnel.

Doesn't seem to work with Docker via Colima, etc. We use registry mirrors to access a registry over an SSH tunnel. We do two strange things (right now) that only seem to work with Docker Desktop for Mac <=4.3.2: I don’t really think this is necessary, and seems like something that could just as easily be done with a gist, but if you are looking for the absolute quickest way to get up and running with docker (and optionally kubernetes) on lima, then this could be it.

I have also seen colima mentioned in the comments, which appears to wrap lima with some prebuilt configurations. But I have settled on lima as I prefer the CLI for scripted installations, and also find it to be more customizable. Lima is used under the hood in rancher desktop, which is another great option if you would prefer to have a gui. This works nicely in particular for local development while using a VPN client, which I have found has a tendency to interfere with local network traffic (if split tunneling is disabled). One of nice features of lima is that it automatically forwards ports from the host vm to guest, so when you start up a container listening on port 5432, for example, you can access it at localhost:5432. It also supports M1 Macs, and even Intel on Arm emulation (at a pretty hefty performance cost).

Lima is built on qemu, which is always a solid choice for virtualization. It’s only a couple of commands to get up and running with their docker example. The favorite replacement that I have found for docker desktop is to run docker-ce in lima vm.

Docker for mac localhost port conflicts