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Comment by ben7799 | Hacker News Reader

We use Docker Desktop for the Mac at work. (Large company)

Docker for Mac absolutely sucks. If they’re going to force everyone to pay they better start fixing bugs.

They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug.

I literally asked IT for a Linux VM/Cloud machine yesterday for development because my Mac is dead in the water due to a bug. It’s time efficient to develop on the Mac if it works, but the overall experience is terrible compared to Linux on the desktop IMO.

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I recently switched jobs and made sure I wasn't going to get a mac again just because of Docker Desktop. At my last job, we had an application that did some very strange things with the Docker API. It regularly crash or lock up the VM or hit subtle correctness bugs in networking.

I get the problem they are trying to solve is extremely difficult. I don't think I'd do much better trying to seamlessly ship a very Linux-centric API on Mac and Windows. They have my sympathy but that doesn't mean I'll use the product given a choice.

I'm the only person at my company who asked for a Linux machine. And I got it. Everyone else is on an M1. I said no. I don't want to use a Mac ever again. I had a Mac for 2 years at my previous company, one of those 2018 monstrousities. Never again.

I asked for a P14 AMD Ryzen 7 5850H ThinkPad. Its still en route. But until then I'm using my Dell G5 SE Ryzen 7 4800H laptop with Manjaro. Best dev experience I've ever had at a company. The dev machine adds to the package IMO. If you're not getting the tools you want, you're not being paid enough ever.

I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows. You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like that.

> I've found Docker Desktop to be equally awful with Windows. You'd think they'd care about giant swathes of the market like that.

The fact that they don't care, and yet you (or if not you, others) still use it, succinctly explains why they do not care.

If they have a shitty, buggy client for Mac/Windows, and people complain about it but still use it, then they have no incentive to care.

It's hard to complain to much about a free product that is a side line to the companies main business... Oh wait, we just lost the free version and it's now the companies main monetization scheme? Well now I care a lot about the little annoying bugs I've been dealing with for the last 3 years.

Actually, I did like jandrese did, and got our solutions out of docker.

I use it only when some required tool is only available via docker. It is not a choice for us for any of our development.

I've found it to be really good on Windows 10 Pro, even with 6 year old hardware.

I've been using it full time since 2018 and it's been nothing but really fast and as stable as you can ask for given how complex of a tool it is. It rarely crashes (maybe once every few months) and I've built thousands of images across many different tech stacks.

We de-dockerized our Windows deployments because it was causing no end of headaches for the end users.

Wish they fixed the issue where it uses all available RAM even when running no containers yet.

That’s not an issue though. That’s just how virtual machines work. You’re carving out a chunk of your system for the docker Linux VM that runs your containers.

You can open up the docker app and configure a smaller amount of ram if it impacts your host OS

No, that's not how it works with WSL2 as the backend. You then cannot configure a smaller amount of RAM in the docker app, it's greyed out. One can limit the RAM that WSL has, but that's not really helpful when docker steals all of it. (And WSL2 supports dynamic allocation of memory anyways, so it's supposed to return unused memory to the host)

So you are wrong. For those of us affected by the bug, it's a big issue.

You can configure the max memory in wsl 2 with .wslconfig file.

yes, but docker will eat whatever I give to it, leaving nothing for the actual containers or other stuff in wsl

Linux considers unused RAM to be wasted RAM. WSL 2 addresses this with a Linux kernel change that right now is insiders only. I expect it to land with Windows 11.

That's not how virtual machines work on Windows. Even Linux virtual machines use dynamic memory. You assign a minimum, maximum, and a startup value. When the machine needs more RAM, Windows give it to it. When it releases it, it's available for other purposes.

When running no containers? I've found that it's a problem when one is running (the solution to that is here[1]), but I've not experienced it when nothing is running.

[1] https://blog.simonpeterdebbarma.com/2020-04-memory-and-wsl/

>They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay, and then promptly shipped a point release with a showstopper bug.

Whoa, really? Is this written up somewhere?

My first "WTF" with docker was in Fall 2015 when we dockerized our app and had it nicely set up so we could tell employees "run this command and the app Just Works" ... and then they introduced a breaking change to the format of docker compose files so it just mysteriously stopped working in the middle of the day.

They might be referring to this? https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/183

Thanks! Great HN discussion about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547268

Yeah, that's probably not gonna happen. At the scale Docker is operating at now, the reason the Mac app sucks, is because it's really hard. They already have the resources to throw at this problem now and this is the product we have.

This is purely a $$$ move (which is fine) but we shouldn't expect an order of magnitude more work going into the product as a result of this move, imo.

If you expect me to pay for it, it better work well enough to not be a blocker to my critical job path workflow.

But you're not actually paying for it. Your employer is.

They are still looking for their business model, because they have no money. They have been unprofitable for their whole existence.

Our team uses it too, but we don't even use the UI - it's just to get the daemon started on startup. Is there a way to do this easily on the Mac without using Docker Desktop?

you could check something like ubuntu multipass

I have to restart Docker for Mac multiple times a day. I'm surprised there hasn't been a community driven open source alternative yet

Singularity ( https://singularity.hpcng.org/user-docs/master/introduction.... ) is a platform that lets you create and run containers. Source is on github : https://github.com/hpcng/singularity

podman-remote with a Linux VM?

> They recently stopped allowing skipping a release unless you pay

I honestly thought that's a bug. That is so ridiculous if that's intentional. I agree with your post and have similar experiences with Docker for Mac

After they introduced that feature I hit a bug where it would try to force an upgrade to version "null" and then crash. I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall it to get things usable again.

The Docker experience is (and has been) subopar on MacOS. With the way Apple Silicon is headed, I don't really have much faith that the situation is going to get better, and I really wonder if the Mac client is even a priority for them at this point.

Docker for Windows isn't particularly stellar either. For instance, you have to actually log in to a machine to have a docker image running. Additionally only one user on a machine can run the host application at any given time.

I have no idea how this is popular.

That isn't the case on Windows Server, and on Windows Desktop SKUs, having a logged in user is normal and expected.

Actually I’m talking about windows server. Do you have any guides? Because when I try to open the docker GUI it kicks everyone out.

I got bitten by a Mac bug a couple of months ago: The latest version of Docker desktop didn't work for something (don't remember anymore) so I had to revert to a previous version and work in that for several months now.

In my experience, minikube (hyperkit) performs better than DockerForMac Kubernetes, if we ignore mounting of macOS folders to the VM.

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