It looks like Rancher Desktop uses Lima VM (https://github.com/lima-vm/lima) under the hood, I suppose in the same way that Docker Desktop uses Hypervisor.framework on macos? This is the first I've heard about the Lima project. I'll be interested to see how file system performance with this compares to Docker Desktop on mac.

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Which also is built on top of lima.

It’s been great, some network wonkiness, and works on m1 perfectly.

The rancher devs have been contributing back to the project helping improve both.