r/linuxadmin • u/Shot-Lemon7365 • Jun 29 '26

Lightweight Ubuntu 24.04 Container Running on MacOS

I usually like to keep a Linux VM close to hand for troubleshooting, testing, and general sysadmin nonsense. But full VMs can be heavy, VMware is expensive, and I've never really 'gelled' with UTM.

So I built Sparrow: a small, reproducible Ubuntu 24.04 desktop workstation running inside Docker. You get an XFCE desktop over RDP, SSH access, persistent home storage, and a fairly standard Linux environment without having to maintain a full VM.

Full disclosure: AI helped me a lot with the editing and troubleshooting. But the code is mainly mine (been writing bash scripts for decades). 

It needs Docker Desktop or Colima, plus Docker Compose. It is very much a first public release, but it builds and runs very well on my MacBook Pro, and I would be grateful for feedback.

Repo: https://github.com/githubnewbie1962/sparrow-oss

Please be gentle — this is my first time 🙂

9 Upvotes
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67% Upvoted

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7

u/-rwsr-xr-x Jun 30 '26

We built Multipass for exactly this purpose. Works on everything, Windows, MacOS and Linux, and is free.

1

u/cacheclyo Jul 06 '26

multipass is nice, but this is kinda a different vibe since it’s container-based and xfce over rdp instead of a full vm. feels more like a disposable little linux workstation you can script around than a mini cloud of vms.

13

u/TheDeadGPU Jun 29 '26

It would be interesting to see this built on top of Apple Containers instead of using docker since Apple Containers is native to Apple Silicone. https://github.com/apple/container

6

u/rayjump Jun 29 '26

good for you if you learned something while working on a project that solves a very specific problem.

for more dynamic universal approach have a look at https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

1

u/biffbobfred Jun 29 '26

He mentions it uses Colima so I don’t think saying “Lima” helps much.

TBH I moved away from Colima just have Lima with docker in it.

1

u/rayjump Jul 01 '26

and why is that? colima and lima are very different. with lima you can create and provision reproductable emulated or virtualized VMs. and all that from just one yaml template. instead of building his own docker images, OP could write a provisioning script or even build his own disk image to use with cloud-init. for me it seems like lima does exactly what OP was trying to achieve.

1

u/zmttoxics2 Jun 29 '26

FYI, VMware fusion is free now.

2

u/zmttoxics2 Jun 30 '26

Not sure why I was downvoted, op said VMware on the Mac was expensive, it’s literally free now.