ORBSTACK.md

Orbstack Setup

This guide links orbstack machines to the macos home to give a near seamless experience (only works if your dotfiles are portable).

Note that this doesn't actually move the HOME directory on the Linux machine, but rather only moves HOME in the shell session. Some applications which depend on daemons and background jobs will not work properly as a result. I prefer this approach to avoid applications in the VM that are outside of my control from modifying my macos home directory. For this reason, alone I don't recommend using usermod to actually move the Linux home directory to your macos home directory.

Account Setup

Set your username for your user account:

sudo -s

Change 'chant' to your username:

passwd chant

Link to /Users

Install git and zsh through your package manager:

sudo apt install git zsh

Edit the /home/$USER/.zshrc file:

#!/bin/bash

export HOME="/Users/$USER"
source /Users/$USER/.zshrc

Then logout and login to the orb machine.

Now, whenever you log in to the orb machine, your default shell will be zsh, with your macos home directory as the $HOME environment variable.

Note that this only works if your dotfiles are portable across macos & linux like mine are.

Something didn't work, how do I go back?

Change your shell back to bash (one of the benefits of doing this in zsh instead of the default shell).

chsh -s /bin/bash

Then logout and login to the orb machine.