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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

Docker on Mac is a performance and battery hog in my experience.

I have a few boxes at home in a lab setup (accessible externally via VPN) that I use for these sorts of things. The less crap running on my Mac the better.

That being said - when you have a handful of clients who are all running in Docker compose… it’s nice to say “down” on one, “up” on another as though I’m switching git branches.

Working on transitioning to kube so I can IaaC a lot of it - but it’s nice to have my local machine freed up.

A slight tangent, but what kind of hardware are you using for this kind of home lab setup?

I have 2x Dell R720's and a consumer-grade i7-3770k box, some shiny ubiquity gear mixed with ugly network gear, and a Synology DS918+ for personal storage.

I tend to lean on straight up Debian linux for most things. One of the R720's is a VMWare ESXi host, the other is a k0s box running on Debian Buster, and the 3770k runs Fedora because I wanted to taste the redhat/dnf fruit but I am diehard Debian.

Pic: https://s3.whalesalad.com/misc/rack.jpg (super messy, in dire need of a cleanup)

I've seen that book case before. Is it IKEA?

Yep. https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/hejne-shelf-unit-softwood-s7903...

It also keeps yammering on and on about new versions and required updates. Just that is reason enough to get rid of it.

"Oh no, I have to update my software!"

Are you serious?

Docker is notorious for completely breaking everything with their updates. They are also very intrusive about it, and make ignoring updates a paid feature.

This isn't just a "i don't want to update" issue. It's a "docker is terrible software and their business model is just as terrible".

Literally never had anything break due to upgrades in the ~7 years I've used docker (on Linux), but ok. Do you have any examples?

They renamed some packages a few times but no big deal, just uninstall the old ones and reinstall the new ones and everything's back up & running with all data kept. The worst thing was when they switched from aufs to overlay2 but that was years ago.

Countless examples of automatic updates borking installs on the github issue tracker.

You misunderstand. I am not annoyed that it notifies me. I’m annoyed that it keeps notifying me about the same version and locks the ‘skip this version’ button behind a subscription.

When they tell you that you need to upgrade if you want fewer updates, you know the daily updates aren't necessary.

It's so bad I just install a RHEL VM and use podman instead. The difference is insane.

In my experience, docker-machine-nfs has the best performance on mac. No syncing of files.

Obligatory shilling for openSUSE Tumbleweed :) Newer libraries, Podman, rolling release and higher perf.

Disclaimer: Just a fan.

My entire homelab is Suse based, love love love it. I use RHEL for development at work becase our entire infra is RHEL based and that's it, everwhere I have a choice I use Suse.

Yep, consistently uses 10-20% of a core even when I have absolutely nothing related to docker running.

So is any Electron-based app (like Slack and VS Code) and Chrome.

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