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Comment by Thomaschaaf | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Docker Desktop e.g. Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows is available for free. I think it's a value added service and is executed beautifully and would be a fair way for the company to generate revenue.

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Because if you can't do `docker build` locally when learning or building software or studying IT then you will look for alternatives which allow you to achieve the final goal in a similar or "just good enough" way and then you will never start using Docker, not even in production.

For many developers Docker alone has a huge cost of entry in terms of learning. If you also ask them to pay for something which many dread to learn then even less people will adopt a technology which is actually one of the best innovations in software delivery from the last decade.

A lot of products e.g. CAD Software are available for free for personal/educational use or for a limited time. Alternatively I like the approach JetBrains (IntelliJ) are taking by providing the software for free or a reduced price: https://www.jetbrains.com/de-de/idea/buy/#discounts?billing=...

That not generally how developer infrastructure tools work these days.

Without it being free it would likely be replaced by a free alternative that would further limit Docker Inc from directly influencing their users now the core Docker daemon has been thoroughly commoditized.

There is no reason for Docker when all OS just have native containers support.

In the end it is just a bunch of APIs to abstract OS APIs, which end up being the minimum common denominator, as each OS offers different container capabilities.

There is no reason for Docker when all OS just have native containers support.

Indeed. On Fedora Docker has already been replaced by rootless Podman containers, which are great for development. I wouldn't be surprised if Podman will take over on Linux workstations pretty quickly.

Docker/Containerisation is open source software with a free to use license? If this was restricted on Mac and Windows it would just add another reason to avoid these for infrastructure use. Avoiding OSX for this is already a no-brainer, given the lack of cloud availability and otherwise pricing, but at least if you're stuck with that, you can learn the tools for free. More or less the same for Windows, although there you at least have some cloud offerings.

Considering how badly Docker runs on Mac, I don't think anybody would pay for it. I had to set up a Linux machine I ssh into locally just to be able to work.

My experience was generally different. Yes, it gets hot and loud on Intel. But I can still do web development that involves PG, Rails/Django, and Redis.

With 2-3 containers there isn't an issue. When you need to run 8-10 at once, the machine becomes unusable. Same setup on Linux doesn't even register as load.

There must be something wrong with the OSX implementation then? Container images should be static and won't be duplicated across multiple instances. Maybe I'm wrong about how it should work. My impression was that if I had a 1 GiB image, I could spin up 50 of these, and still use roughly 1 GiB of memory (assuming running process es don't need to allocate much themselves).

Edit: From testing by spinning up 10 MySQL servers, sure looks to be the case. Each runtime allocated approx 215 MiB of memory, which is what the available system memory was reduced by for each. The container image itself was approx 400 MiB.

Subjectively speaking, I would happily pay thirty bucks for a native alternative to Docker Desktop. I find the UI gross and disruptive.

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