I ditched Docker for Podman

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

That's their completely optional prerogative

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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