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dbmikus • last Friday at 5:29 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

Def!

My personal belief is that the future of an "app" is a combo:

    1. micro VM
    2. agent on the VM
    3. software bundled into the VM
So, it should be stupid simple to run these local sandboxed apps/agents. Right now, not too hard for technical users (esp. with things like https://smolmachines.com/ and https://microsandbox.dev/), but not as easy as clicking an app icon or typing `/path/to/binary` in the CLI

Replies

spockz • last Friday at 6:29 PM

Microsandbox claims to start faster than docker, and it is isolated from the host, and to work with OCI. Why would I still want to use docker? The only reason I can imagine is that I actually want to be able to dynamically share resources between containers instead of dividing up VMs a priori.

Ah, the significant compute overhead: https://josecastillolema.github.io/podman-wasm-libkrun/. Much more cpu and ram usage at worse performance.

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chrisweekly • last Friday at 7:00 PM

I was going to add a comment praising smolmachines' smolvms. Simple, fast (sub-200ms cold start), OCI-compat, and has trivial packing to standalone 0-dep executables. No need for Docker Desktop / colima / orbstack. For those who prioritize security, kernel isolation is a meaningful benefit.

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tough • yesterday at 5:50 AM

heh I vibe-coded a little local app to have smolmachines and tart, for smolmachines i had to vibe-fork 2 deps deep to get GUI support working, but now i have linux desktop computers on smol machines!

also have support for lima/colima/podman

indigodaddy • last Friday at 8:10 PM

You basically described exe.dev

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digitaltrees • yesterday at 4:00 AM

I am building this.