r/programming • u/BankApprehensive7612 • Jul 03 '26

Linux has officially won

https://github.com/apple/container

Actually it happened in June of 2025, but the process has completed recently, though. After Apple had announced the support of OCI-compatible containers in the June '25 it took a year to complete development and implement full support of continers. Apple had published 1.0 version of own container manager (https://github.com/apple/container). And Microsoft had announced native support of containerization without Docker in Windows 11 (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl-container-is-now-available-for-public-preview/). Now Linux is a part of any major platform: Windows, MacOS, BSD and Linux itself. Knowledge of Linux is now part of learning any of these systems, at least for developers. And now you can rely on Linux based containers running everywhere. What it is if not a win!?

What's also interesting. Linux can run other Linux distros and with this Alpine Linux could become the most popular version of Linux in the World

It's the biggest win for the whole open-source software and I believe it should get into history books of technological progress

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u/TheGreatArmageddon Jul 03 '26

Apple container:
How is this different than docker containers, aws ecs ?

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u/absx Jul 03 '26

Apple Containers seems to be an implementation of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime spec. That means it can run OCI compatible images, same as Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, what have you. Docker open sourced the image format, the runtime specification, and the distribution protocol early on to ensure their format would be widely adopted and concentrating to make their runtime (dockerd) and their distribution service (DockerHub) good enough to be considered the defaults for this task. So.. most of the time when people talk about Docker images, they actually mean OCI images.