Curious how this works without a VM, or have they created some sort of linux "shim", a la WSL1.x?
If it's something like WSL1.x it means you're not actually "running linux", which may have subtle repercussions like differences in threading etc since it's really a Darwin system wearing a Linux suit.
That said if you're writing a CRUD app in python, that probably won't matter to you so it's still worth the tradeoff.
“OrbStack uses a lightweight Linux virtual machine with a shared kernel to minimize overhead and save resources, similar to WSL 2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). This flexible architecture comes with many advantages such as high efficiency, low resource usage, seamless integration with macOS, and more.”
Seems they're maintaining an unpublished fork of the Linux kernel "linux-macvirt" to achieve this. Apparently you have to contact them directly for a copy of the code[1]
It integrates very nicely, has very low CPU idle usage and also lets you quickly spawn VMs with bidirectional file sharing set up.
Since I switched I haven't looked back.