How does it compare to lima-vm?

[fwilhe2]

Hi, I came across virter due to this talk and in the comparison section (also in the README of this repo) I was missing lima.

What I'm getting is that virter is based on libvirt rather than (plain) qemu, and that it lends more from Docker in a UX perspective and with OCI as storage for images, but other than that it feels pretty similar to me. Maybe it would be nice to add lima to the README to clarify how the mission statement is different.

[JoelColledge]

Hi, thanks for asking. I'm not familiar with Lima, so I'm not sure about the differences. I have looked briefly, and it appears that they started with different motivations but do have a significant amount of overlap.

Lima seems to have the motivation of "I would like a Linux environment to run some tools".

Virter has the motivation of "I would like a cluster of VMs based on a custom image to run some tests".

Without actually trying Lima, I'm not confident enough to write a comparison.

As for the question of why the comparison does not include Lima. Perhaps because that section f2f290d predates the Lima project lima-vm/lima@7459f45. I'm happy for a comparison to be added. Contributions welcome 🙂