Once you have XQuartz set up you can then install your favourite graphical Linux apps into a Debian container or whichever distribution you prefer. => Creating Caskroom at /usr/local/Caskroom => brew cask install Caskroom/cask/xquartz It's packaged up as the XQuartz project and can be installed with brew: $ brew install Caskroom/cask/xquartz Install an X11 serverĪn X11 server exists for MacOS which allows applications like XTerm to run and display output on your local computer. Here's what you need to do to bring X11 to your Desktop. Slack for Linux running on the Mac Desktop in El Captain Step-by-step So why pay for something you can do for free with Docker? By using your own hosted proxy server or VPN you can protect some or all of your traffic. This is ideal if you frequently work on public WiFi networks or behind a restrictive corporate network. Several paid tools exist for macOS to isolate network traffic and push it down different HTTP proxies or SOCKS tunnels depending on custom rulesets. Since Docker provides a sandboxed environment for applications that means you can add/remove just the capabilities you want and tighten up on security. or to isolate and/or spy on network traffic.To use tools which may not be ported to macOS yet.To test various versions of the same software simultaneously.To access to newer versions of software.Here are a few reasons why you may want to use Docker to run Linux applications on macOS: So why would you want to run Linux versions of apps on your Mac? In some cases they have been ported and re-built natively and even optimized to take advantage of the OS.

Many applications that exist for Linux also exist for Mac: Chrome, FireFox, VLC Player, Slack, Arduino IDE etc. If you are running an XWindows server (which you probably are) then getting a graphical application to appear on your screen from a remote Linux system or a Docker container can be as simple as setting the DISPLAY environmental variable. Package managers like apt-get, yum and pacman make installing new software almost seamless. If you use Linux as your host operating system then with one or two commands you can have most graphical Linux applications up and running on your desktop in seconds.

Use docker on mac