First, I guess I'll just invoke Sturgeon's law[1] -- almost all software, especially if you don't really understand it, is crap, and probably the software you understand is also crap, you're just used to it. Good software is pretty tricky to make.
But second -- I use colima lots, on my home macs and my work macs, and it mostly just works. The profiles stuff is kinda annoying and I find myself accidentally running arm when I want x86, or other tedious config issues crop up. But it actually has been easier to live with than docker desktop where I'd run out of space and things would fall apart.
Docker on MacOS is broadly going work poorly relative to it on linux, just from having to run the docker stuff in a linux vm that's hiding somewhere behind the scenes.
If you find too much friction with any of these, probably it's easier to just run a linux vm on the mac and interact with docker in the 'native' environment. I've found UTM to be quite a bit easier to live with than virtualbox.
> almost all software, especially if you don't really understand it, is crap, and probably the software you understand is also crap, you're just used to it. Good software is pretty tricky to make.
Most software has issues, but Colima is noticeably worse than most software I've used. And the complete lack of documentation is definitely not normal.
It runs qemu under the hood if you want to run x86 (or sparc or mips!) instead of arm on a newer mac.
[1]https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/colima