I ditched Docker for Podman

OrbStack looks pretty nice, BUT an $8/mo/user subscription? Blech.

vs $11 for docker? blech

Trust me. It worth each cent.

It doesn't only look prettier, it also starts and works a lot faster. Switched a few years ago; at that time Docker desktop has a known issue of continually using 5% CPU on Mac which they didn't fix for years.

Orbstack is worth every penny. It's simply amazingly solid compared to Podman on macOS (a year ago at least, I don't know if Podman has improved). We migrated 100+ devs to Orbstack and it was like a collective sigh of relief that we finally had something that actually worked.

I don't understand why people need a gui for docker/podman.

Take a look at https://docs.orbstack.dev/

It's much more than a gui for it supports running k8s locally, managing custom vm instances, resource monitoring of containers, built in local domain name support with ssl mycontainer.orb, a debug shell that gives you ability to install packages that are not available in the image by default, much better and automated volume mounting and view every container in finder, ability to query logs, an amazing ui, plus it is much, much faster and more resource efficient.

I am normally with you that terminal is usually enough, but the above features really do make it worth it especially when using existing services that have complicated failure logs or are resource intensive like redis, postgres, livekit, etc or you have a lot of ports running and want to call your service without having to worry about remembering port numbers or complicated docker network configuration.

Honestly just the debug shell alone is worth a good amount of $. You can remotely run shell commands on your deployed docker container and install packages that are not available in the base image without modifying the base image which can be a life saver.

https://docs.orbstack.dev/features/debug

Let alone the local resource monitor, increased, performance, automated local domains (no more complicated docker network settings to get your app working with local host), and more.

Useful software that makes our lives more convenient is worth paying for--after all, it pays most of our salaries, doesn't it?

It feels a little hypocritical for us to feed our families through our tech talent and then complain that someone else is doing the same.

It's the subscription model that chafes. For SaaS? Ok, sure. But for a desktop app, I just don't like it. It might not be entirely rational. shrug

I use orbstack, but I never look at it, it just opens when I start up the computer. I used to use docker desktop, which I never looked at either. The docker daemon has always just been broken on Mac for as long as I've been trying to work with it (about 4 years, at least as far as Mac environments).

Idk what the problem is, but it's ugly. I switched to orbstack because there was something like a memory leak happening with docker desktop, just using waaaaay too many resources all the time, sometimes it would just crash. I just started using docker desktop from the get-go because when I came on I had multiple people with more experience say 'oh, you're coming from linux? Don't even try to use the docker daemon, just download docker desktop'.

it does sound pretty compelling

On Windows, the easiest thing is to just use podman without podman desktop. It installs easily as a winget package and works in your current shell without having to first start WSL (it does that behind the scenes).

On Linux, for development, podman and docker are pretty similar but I prefer the k8s yaml approach vs compose so tend to use podman.

I don't think Apple really cares about dev use cases anymore so I haven't used a Mac for development in a while (I would for iOS development of course if that ever came up).

Check out my tool https://github.com/jrz/container-shell

I basically use (orbstack) docker containers as light weight VM, easily accessible through multiple shells and they shutdown when nothing is running anymore.

I use them for development isolation? Or when I need to run some tool. It mounts the current directory, so your container is chrooted to that project.

See my other reply