Apple just made Docker Desktop optional on Mac.

And it is completely free.

This is apple/container. 26.5k stars no Github.

You can now run Linux containers natively on your Mac without installing Docker Desktop, without a background daemon hogging your RAM, and without paying $21 a month per developer for a commercial license.

Here is what it does:

→ Runs Linux containers as lightweight VMs directly on Apple Silicon using macOS 26 virtualization

→ Fully OCI compatible. Pull any image from Docker Hub, GitHub Container Registry or anywhere else

→ Written in Swift and optimised specifically for Apple Silicon. Faster and lighter than anything Docker Desktop does on Mac

→ Standard container CLI syntax. If you know Docker commands you already know how to use this

→ Push images you build to any standard container registry and run them anywhere

Docker Desktop charges $21 per developer per month for commercial use. Apple's version costs nothing and ships as open source under Apache-2.0.

Microsoft made Docker Desktop optional on Windows with WSL Containers last month.

Apple just did the same on Mac.

Docker is not going anywhere. But the era of paying for a GUI wrapper around containers on your own machine is quietly ending.

Repo here: http://github.com/apple/container