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OT: But wouldn't be surprised to see Docker Desktop for Mac running on M1 in 3-6 months.

Been without a personal laptop for close to a year now, mostly using my work laptop or personal desktop... and have been considering the M1, but likely won't pull the trigger without better Docker support. I've found WSL2+Docker support to be excellent and hope to see similar levels of integration with OSX before too long.

Using the CLI to connect to a VM isn't so bad, did this a lot before Docker Desktop was even a thing, though I generally just ran an SSH shelled into the VM full time. With VS Code's remote extension, it's roughly the same either way.

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Docker support with full support for running x86 docker images from docker hub via rosetta would be what is needed for me. I'm not sure that is going to be feasible but not being able to run vanilla x86 docker images means I can't build most server side projects I've worked on in recent years because they all fire up things like elasticsearch, redis, posgresql, etc. as part of their builds so tests can run against these thing. All of those are basically either vendor provided docker images or things on Dockerhub in x86 form. Manually creating arm variants for these things and customizing the builds to have ARM variants is not going to be practical for a lot of that stuff. I'd have an easier time switching to Linux or Windows based laptop than to an ARM mac right now.

Realistically, most people that have docker in their life are going to not be bothering with ARM macs for quite some time. In any case, the 16GB limit is also not great if you are using docker, some ide, and other tools. I'd be looking for something closer to 64GB if I was buying currently. Maybe the second generation will be a bit more attractive and maybe by then the software ecosystem will have matured a bit. Right now basically everything I use on a daily basis is somewhat problematic.

> Docker support with full support for running x86 docker images from docker hub via rosetta would be what is needed for me.

Docker isn’t going to be doing that, at least they’re not going to work on it themselves.

According to docs https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/multi-arch/ Docker for Mac can run ARM images on an Intel mac via QEMU already

so it doesn't seem a huge leap to imagine the reverse being possible before too long

(I kind of hoped it already was, but I guess the existence of blog posts like this and the one from Docker here https://www.docker.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-chips-and-docke... indicates there's work to be done on the Docker for Mac app itself to get it working nicely)

https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/5077

"It's us that need to fix it, not Apple, so we expect it to work on the current M1 chips."

Almost all the Docker Hub images like redis, postgres etc are already available for arm64.

Even if you could run those, would you run your integration tests on your ARM Mac knowing the deployment will be on x86? I mean, if it passes for you it might still fail for the other architecture.

I would. Generally would also have a cluster spin up/down to run via the ci/cd platform.

Almost everything I've written for the last 6 years is with tools that are mostly cross platform.

The biggest issues I've had in that time is the prerequisites for rabbitmq in Windows, and building apps using sqlite on embedded.

I think the may be a couple hurdles in the next year, but that apple going to m1 will be the catalyst for much more flushed out arm support in the docker ecosystem. Rpi has done a lot of this already.

I would be surprised if we didn't see Docker Desktop for Mac running on M1 in six months.

macOS already has this and is in fact a proper Unix to begin with. Docker is supported just fine on macOS on Intel (and soon the new chip), and it runs basically Linux inside a VM, just like WSL2 does.

XNU is Not Unix.

That may be, but macOS is considered Unix, and holds a UNIX 03 certification with the Open Group: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm

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