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Ask HN: What are you going to use instead of Docker Desktop for macOS?

22 points by rathboma ↗ HN
Hey Everyone,

With the new Docker Desktop license rapidly approaching what is everyone replacing it with?

For Linux and Windows (with WSL) I just use the docker engine cli, but for Mac, I'm not sure.

Obviously some of you are just paying for it which is cool, but in this thread I'm specifically interested in alternatives.

Options I know about:

- Podman - https://podman.io/getting-started/installation - has complicated installation instructions for MacOS.

- Rancher Desktop - https://rancherdesktop.io/ - Focused on K8s rather than raw docker containers.

17 comments

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xtracto
I've tried both of those and minikube by itself. For me the main disadvantage has been compatibility with docker-compose. I've got several projects that I run using docker-compose.yml as a "turnkey" solution. The podman compatibility is unusable, and migrating to K8s manifest files is cumbersome. Also Rancher Desktop is not a complete replacement solution, once you install it you have to add some other stuff to make it work.

All this kind of has made me think more about the vendor lock-in that we were having with Docker. I am still looking for a more viable replacement.

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richardjennings
I have been using Lima https://github.com/lima-vm/lima which incidentally is the project behind both rancher desktop and colima I believe. QEMU support allows for running e.g. x86 on arm (with perf/efficiency tradeoffs)
lmarcos
Linux virtual machine (via Vagrant, for instance) and inside I run docker.
electroly
Seconding this. On M1 processors, Parallels does a great job and this arrangement is vastly faster than Docker Desktop. The speed improvement alone makes it worth the cost of the Parallels license and the hassle of setting this up.
lmarcos
Additionally, I think now one can use Vmware fusion and the corresponding Vagrant plugin for free on M1 (because Virtualbox won't work anymore on the new Macs).
yuppie_scum
I got my management to agree that it’s worth the $5 a month for everyone’s productivity.

Hopefully Podman fixes their volume mounting problems and we can just start using that eventually.

pseudoramble
Ah man, that must be a magical place. I spent months (on-and-off) trying to convince my company to do this and failed. I hope they figure it out, because while I worked around it for my needs, I can't imagine I'm the only person who used Docker Desktop at the company, and it genuinely worries me that while IT considers it unapproved software that it won't stop its usage.
afarrell
Which management books did you cite to back you up?
pseudoramble
The wrong ones apparently :) I did attempt to explain that the cost for each dev to figure out an alternative setup would exceed the cost of the license itself, and of course pointed out the possible risk of not taking action if somebody continues to use Docker Desktop unintentionally violating the new license terms.
pseudoramble
My needs are super minimal, one or two containers at a time at most. So I use Docker Engine + docker-machine (sets up a Linux VM in VirtualBox by default) + lazydocker (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker). I did add a function to my fish config to start Docker Engine if needed, load the environment info I need from docker-machine, and then run lazydocker.

Seems to work fine so far for me.

wdb
I have been wondering if VMWare's `vctl` could work for this on the mac
salmo
I’ve just been using minikube. I can just build containers with it or mock up a k8s deployment. Instructions to configure local docker or podman to use it are simple.

With the hyperkit backend it’s pretty similar, just with extra bells and whistles and nothing in the taskbar.

I keep things pretty simple, so there may be cases it doesn’t cover.

If so, then I’d just use a VM. I still use Vagrant a lot for testing non-container stuff. It could be handy there to set up an environment that actually matches your prod setup.