Answering my own question for anyone else who might be curious: OrbStack is essentially LXD for macOS, so on Linux, LXD indeed provides an identical workflow.

In fact, LXD is a bit better. The command line is more powerful, it supports snapshots, the network configuration is more comprehensive, there's a direct access to the host kernel, and the web UI is a nice touch since it can work from a headless VM if needed.

This was one of the few things I was missing on Asahi and Linux in general. Feels good.

A Buildroot VM which runs just enough Linux to provide Docker and virtio file sharing?

You can achieve almost the same thing with Alpine Linux, that's how I run all my containers, one VM per container.

Edit: Further down the comments it says OrbStack is a single Linux VM running LXD containers. Oh well, I was close.

I currently use Vagrant on Linux, but it's slow and resource heavy.

With OrbStack, the ability to set up an Ubuntu or Fedora 'VM' in a few seconds, then install even complex SDN workloads inside is incredible.

Now I want something similar on Linux, especially once I switch to Asahi. I haven't tried LXD yet, but it seems to work similarly to OrbStack with the added benefit of having a full Linux kernel and the ability to modprobe modules and create snapshots, something that isn’t possible with OrbStack. I'll have to give it a try.

LXD is a manager for LXC containers. I have the vague idea that it's like k8s for LXC but I don't really know either orchestration tools well enough to say.

LXC containers are like Docker/Podman containers except they usually run an init process, so you're not running just one binary inside the container.

You can make LXC "app containers" which just run one binary Docker/Podman containers.