I ditched Docker for Podman

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.

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.

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'.

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).