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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Reminder: unlike the docker command line tool, and the dockerd server container management tool, the Docker Desktop products are a) not free software, b) not even source available, and c) send a lot of sensitive data about your system back to Docker Inc without consent.

I didn’t realize this for a while myself, as the docker CLI tools are all free software. The “Desktop” variants are not, and embed spyware.

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Amusingly if you go to the docker desktop download page while using Linux (in my case Fedora) you get "download for: Unknown OS" and if you click on it, it redirects you to "https://one/" which of course fails. Not exactly confidence inspiring.

> send a lot of sensitive data about your system back to Docker Inc without consent

Do you have any more information about this? I tried to google it but couldn't find anything. Not that I doubt that this is happening...

I tried googling "Docker Desktop Telemetry" but now I'm confused.

First link is https://docs.docker.com/ee/telemetry/

Clicking it it redirects me to https://docs.mirantis.com/containers/v3.0/dockeree-products/...

Thank you for highlighting this issue, I certainly think it is something which users should at least be aware of and they don't really do a good job in explaining the distinction.

The value added by the desktop variant also seems very minimal. Anyone seen an open-source easy-to-use docker host for OS X?

is there an alternative to the "Desktop" for Docker we should be using?

Maybe a Linux VM as the Docker host?

Depends on how much of a replacement one is expecting (I guess it's like all commercial versus Open Source software in that way), but docker machine and VirtualBox are a low drama version. There used to be a working setup that used xhyve (on top of Hypervisor.framework) but I had woes that I don't recall the details about right now and even when it did work the networking was much harder to reason about than with VirtualBox

The other advantage of docker machine is that you can also ask for a cloud instance to run dockerd, and that's actually how gitlab-runner does it

Replacing Docker for Mac's kubernetes support is done with either kind or minikube depending on ones desire to have on a modern version versus "yeah, yeah, just run the VM and make kubectl work"

None of those setups have any provided gui/menubar widget support, or similar hand holding, which is why I started this the way I did

I use minikube for local k8s dev but you could also use it as basically a local Linux VM for running docker. It is (slightly) less ergonomic than Docker for Mac but not my much. For the most part I use the qinikube VM for everything docker related since it's annoying to run both a VM for Docker Desktop and for qinikube.

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