Lately, whenever I need to run a quick experiment or spin up a localized environment with multiple moving pieces, I've completely stopped using Docker. Instead, I've been running full, headless Ubuntu virtual machines directly from my host terminal using Canonical's Multipass. And I love it.
It is using your native hypervisor (KVM on Linux, Hyper-V on Windows, or QEMU on macOS), it drops a clean Ubuntu environment onto your laptop with next to zero performance overhead.
The Zero-Friction Sandbox
Instead of wrestling with installation mirrors and configuration screens, Multipass treats virtual machines as disposable command-line primitives.
To spin up a basic machine (we'll name it devbox) and jump inside, the standard baseline looks like this:
