I ditched Docker for Podman

None of your companies need to worry about licenses. Docker ENGINE is free and open source. Docker DESKTOP is a software suite that requires you to purchase a license to use in a company.

But Docker Engine, the core component which works on Linux, Mac and Windows through WSL2, that is completely and 1000% free to use.

Those companies use docker desktop on their dev's machines.

That's their completely optional prerogative

If you've installed Docker on Windows you've most likely done that by using Docker Desktop, though.

There's no need if all your devs use desktop Linux as their primary devices like we do where I work :)

Right, we were using macs - same story.

On Mac we just switched to podman and didn't have anything to worry about.

Podman is inside the Ubuntu WSL image. No need for docker at all

From the official docs:

>This section describes how to install Docker Engine on Linux, also known as Docker CE. Docker Engine is also available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, through Docker Desktop.

https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/

I'm not an expert but everything I read online says that Docker runs on Linux so with Mac you need a virtual environment like Docker Desktop, Colima, or Podman to run it.

Docker desktop will run a virtual machine for you. But you can simply install docker engine in wsl or in a VM on mac exactly like you would on linux (you give up maybe automatic port forwarding from the VM to your host)

This. I run docker in WSL. I also do 100% of my development in WSL (for work, anyway). Windows is basically just my web browser.

Anyone have opinions on OrbStack for mac over these other alternatives?

Docker Engine without Docker Desktop is available through winget as "Docker CLI"[1].

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/tree/master/manifes...

Ironic username. As a die hard, WSL aint bad though. I just can't deal with an OS that automatically quarantines bittorrent clients, decides to override local administrator policies via windows updates and pops up ad notifications.

This is not correct, at least when looking at my screen:

(base) kord@DESKTOP-QPLEI6S:/mnt/wsl/docker-desktop-bind-mounts/Ubuntu/37c7f28..blah..blah$ podman

Command 'podman' not found, but can be installed with:

sudo apt install podman

If you're already paying for Macs, is paying for Docker Desktop really a big problem?

Hmm maybe it’s what our admins provided to us then. I actually have never run it at home only airgapped

I tried all the DD alternatives (on macOS) and I think OrbStack is the easiest to use and least invasive of them all.

But it is not cross-platform, so we settled on Podman instead, which came (distant) second in my tests. The UI is horrible, IMO but hey… compromises.

I use OrbStack for my personal stuff, though.

Been using it for a year or so now and it’s amazing. Noticeably faster than DD and the UI isn’t Electron or whatever’s going on there.

All my personal machines run linux. At work my choices are Mac or Windows. If Macs were still x86_64 I might choose that and run a VM, but I have no interest in learning the pitfalls of cross arch emulation or dealing with arm64 linux distro for a development machine.

+1

I use WSL for work because we have no linux client options. It's generally fine, but both forced windows update reboots as well as seemingly random wsl reboots (assuming because of some component update?) can really bite you if you're in the middle of something.

It's well worth it its 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.

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.

Check it out https://docs.orbstack.dev/

Yes, Orbstack is significantly better than Docker Desktop, and probably also better than any other Docker replacement out there right now (for macOS), if you aren't bothered by the (reasonable) pricing.

It costs about $100/year per seat for commercial use, IIRC. But it is significantly faster than Docker Desktop at literally everything, has a way better UI, and a bunch of QoL features that are nice. Plus Linux virtualization that is both better and (repeating on this theme) significantly more performant than Parallels or VMWare Fusion or UTM.

> But you can simply install docker engine in wsl or in a VM on mac exactly like you would on linux (you give up maybe automatic port forwarding from the VM to your host)

and sharing files from the host, ide integration, etc.

Not that it can't be done. But doing it is not just, 'run it'. Now you manage a vm, change your workflow, etc.

I think the point is that Docker Desktop for macOS is bad.

Cant imagine being forced to use a linux PC for work lmao

orbstack is absolutely amazing. not only the docker side works much better than docker desktop but their lightweight linux vms are just beyond great.

i've been using an archlinux vm for everything development over the past year and a half and i couldn't be happier.

I am using MacOS and like a year ago I uninstalled docker and docker desktop, installed podman and podman-compose, and have changed literally nothing else about how I use containers and docker image building/running locally. It was a drop-in replacement for me.

I happily embraced it, to each their own I guess. There are folks who mainly work on their mac/windows laptops and just ssh into their workstation, but IT gives us way more freedom (full sudo access) on Linux so I can customize a lot more which makes me a lot happier.

I never notice the difference between arm64 and x86 environments, since I'm flipping between them all the time just because the arm boxes are so much cheaper. The only time it matters to me is building containers, and then it's just a matter of passing `--platform=linux/amd64,linux/arm64` to `docker buildx`.

If you're building really arch-specific stuff, then I could see not wanting to go there, but Rosetta support is pretty much seamless. It's just slower.

It's not all that bad these days ever since they added virtio support. Orbstack is well worth paying for as an alternative, but that won't solve anyone's procurement headaches either.

Docker Desktops also supports a local kubernetes stack, but it takes several minutes to start up, and I think in the end it's just minikube? Haven't tried Orbstack's k8s stack myself since I'm good with k3d. I did have cause though to spin up a VM a while back, and that was buttah.

That's just one way. The alternative is WSL 2 with Docker Engine.

I personally use Windows + WSL2 and for work use macOS. I prefer Windows + WSL2 by a longshot. It just "works". macOS never "just works" for me. Colima is fine but requires a static memory allocation for the VM, it doesn't have the level of polish that WSL2 has. Brew is awful compared to apt (which you get with WSL2 because it's just Linux).

And then there's the windowing system of macOS that feels like it's straight from the 90s. "System tray" icons that accumulate over time and are distracting, awful window management with clunky animations, the near useless dock (clicking on VS Code shows all my 6 IDEs, why?). Windows and Linux are much modern in that regard.

The Mac hardware is amazing, well worth its price, but the OS feels like it's from a decade ago.

I just follow the official Linux instructions on the Docker website. It just works.

Of course, but that's the value-add of Docker Desktop. But you don't have to tie yourself to it, or even if you do use it for a bit to get going faster, you have a migration path open to doing it yourself should you need it.

Really? We switched 6+ months ago and I'm still dealing with all the little broken corners that keep cropping up.

Oh! I wasn’t trying to make a big point except that paying for software isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and if you’re already invested in Macs you’re presumably OK with paying good money for good products.

Having used Docker Desktop on a Mac myself, it seems... fine? It does the job well enough, and it’s part of the development rather than production flow so it doesn’t need to be perfect, just unobtrusive.